The step Microsoft is taking is probably going to fall back on them. XP is probably the most bought and shipped OS made by Microsoft. I, myself, are using it right now. It's has been pretty stable on me, it hasn't crashed too often. But my computer probably couldn't bear with Vista, it's already two years old. Three years ago I was still using windows 98, whilst others had XP. It wasn't very comfortable to find out that Microsoft stopped giving support to Windows 98. I think Microsoft's ideas aren't acceptable! I'm thinking about converting to Linux if it gets worse...