So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye; it's been a period of exits for Microsoft with the retirement of founder Bill Gates and now the uber-successful operating system Windows XP finally reaching its cut-off point.

And yet, unlike other Windows versions which have tailed away into oblivion, XP – far from fading away – has enjoyed a burst of popularity in what many thought would be its swansong.

I've already written hundreds of words on why that is; the failure of Vista to catch the public imagination and the proliferation of low-powered, low-cost sub-notebooks, but I suppose in all of that I haven't really focused on the most obvious thing.

The vast majority of people are happy with XP.

Foibles

Oh they hate all the foibles that the average technophile can list ad nauseum, and one look at an alternative might well make an impact on their opinions.

But for Joe Q Public XP does enough. It lets them look at the internet, do some word processing, have a gander at their photos or video clips. In short – without anything to compare it against since their last version of Windows, XP more than suffices.

I think as tech writers, and perhaps it's true of our audience as well, we sometimes get sucked into believing that everyone knows the qualities of Leopard, the openness and promise of Linux and the failings of XP.

I also think that technophiles – by and large – give very short shrift to the industry's 300 pound gorilla. It goes a long way to explaining the widespread glee over Vista's failure to become as stellar as Microsoft had hoped.

So while we often get dragged into that most heinous of journalistic crimes – assuming knowledge from our readers – we are aware that not everybody knows that SP2 was a virtual ground-up rewrite of XP or that key features have been appropriated.

Lies, damn lies and...

But to put things in perspective – although statistically, we have a lot more users of Linux and OS X than more mainstream and less tech-focused sites – the overwhelming majority of our traffic is from XP users.

A healthy percentage of that is work users who do not choose the OS that their business goes for, but there is a large amount who actively prefer Windows.

I still use Windows XP on my own home PC – it's, for me, a gamer, the easy choice and, although I'm aware of its problems, it more-than suffices.

Going forward – maybe that will change.