It's a Vista world!

Paraphrasing the mayor of San Francisco, Microsoft's official operating system is Windows Vista - whether you like it or not!

Windows 7, which I discussed in an earlier post, isn't released yet.

And most Windows XP support has ceased:

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Tuesday officially terminated support for the Windows XP operating system for most users as it paves the way for the arrival of Windows 7 and tries to salvage what's left of the market for the widely maligned Vista OS.

As planned, Microsoft's Mainstream Support program for Windows XP ended Tuesday. That means users of the 8-year-old operating system will have to pay Microsoft on a per-incident basis if they want help with XP.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that Windows XP is completely, totally dead.

Microsoft plans to end all support for Windows XP, paid and unpaid, on April 8, 2014.

More here (InformationWeek). While InformationWeek notes that this will primarily affect small businesses, in actuality even they won't necessarily be affected all that much, except by new applications, since presumably all of the bugs in Windows XP have been wrung out by now.

I was going to check Microsoft's support policy for Internet Explorer 6, but I had problems getting www.microsoft.com to load in any of my browsers - even my Microsoft browser.