Microsoft has announced that while its plans to discontinue sales of Windows XP are going ahead, it intends to offer support for the software for a further six years.

In 2007 Microsoft announced that it would extend the sales period for Windows XP until June 30, 2008. With the deadline due in a week’s time, the company had to keep its customers who shunned the shoddy Windows Vista happy.

Gary Chen, a Yankee Group analyst said, “Many users are happy with XP and have been pressuring [original equipment manufacturers] and Microsoft to let them keep using it without being forced to upgrade to Vista.”

“The extension of tech support will impact both enterprise-level customers as well as average users,” he said.

“I think there are many users in both areas that are happy with XP. I think enterprises will be impacted a bit more as they have more compatibility requirements and would like to keep XP longer than the typical consumer,” Chen added.

Although the OS officially stops selling on June 30th, customers will be able to get their hands on it for several months.

Computer manufacturer Dell announced that they would continue to sell some systems with a pre-installed copy of XP until June 18th, but subsequently pushed the date back to June 26th.

Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst said, “A lot of this is semantics. Microsoft set the end of support date for XP as soon as Vista shipped; XP extended support ends in April 2014. This is based on Microsoft’s five-plus-five support life cycle. XP would be supported in mainstream phase until two years after Vista shipped.”

“Microsoft uses the Jan. 30, 2007, launch as that date and rounds it up to the first Patch Tuesday following the end of the quarter, so mainstream support ends in April 2009. The five years of extended support starts on that date, meaning that they will support XP with security fixes until April 2014, or two years after Windows 7 ships, whichever is later,” he added

Yankee Groups Chen believes the move is “both good and bad” for Microsoft.

“[It’s] good that Microsoft is listening to its customers and trying to satisfy them, but [it’s] concerning for the Windows franchise. It is increasingly getting harder to motivate people to upgrade to new versions. Microsoft is really going to have to innovate and produce some ‘must-have’ features for future Windows versions,” he explained.

“The decision may also cause a slowdown in sales of Windows Vista in the short term,” Chen noted.

“It will allow the existing XP users to hold off upgrading for awhile. But in the long term, upgrading to Vista is inevitable, so it’s just really a matter of when. At some point, your PC hardware is going to fail or get terribly outdated before 2014, and that will dictate buying a new machine, which will come with Vista,” he concluded.