Windows XP makes comeback

There was a monumental announcement in the computing world recently that was barely noticed outside of the trade press.

Dell, which is tied with HP as the largest computer maker in the country, quietly announced it was going to offer Windows XP again on models in two of its lines, the Inspiron and Dimension.

This follows an intense series of posts on Dell's "IdeaStorm" blog, which was designed to allow direct feedback from consumers and end users to Dell's management.

(Dell, if you have not been following the company, has been hammered of late for poor management and terrible customer service.)

"We heard you loud and clear on bringing the Windows XP option back to our Dell consumer PC offerings," said Dell on its blog.

Why is this significant?

This is a clear shot across the bow of Microsoft and sends two messages I think are really interesting. First, you shipped Vista before it was ready and without any compelling, must-have features. And second, Windows XP is good enough for most people, and we don't really care to learn a different way of doing things.

The first comment is clear; while Vista appears to be stable and pretty, hardware manufacturers have not caught up to it in terms of providing drivers for hardware. Many people are pretty miffed that their printers, scanners, modems and monitors don't have drivers available yet (or drivers not in beta testing).

The second is very interesting. Windows XP was such an amazing upgrade from Windows Millennium that people slept out in front of stores the night before the release just to get a copy. Before that, Windows 95 was a huge step forward from its predecessor, Windows 3.11. There was a similar clamor to get copies out the door.

But consumers have learned the hard way that life on the bleeding edge of technology doesn't come without pain.

Companies ordering new PCs from Dell were, in many cases, reformatting the units and installing XP. (Many large companies won't upgrade operating systems until at least the first service pack is released and sometimes not at all. They value consistency across the enterprise most of all.)

With Vista there was a totally new way of doing things. It looked different, ran different and needed an incredible amount of computing hardware to run at peak efficiency.

XP, on the other hand, was familiar and worked fine after users suffered the pain of all of the upgrades. Other than the pretty "Aero" interface, what did consumers gain by upgrading to Vista?

It is much the same as Office 2007 to me. I have it, I use it (reluctantly), but I can no longer find how to do things that were second nature to me on earlier versions. I could make the U.S. Olympic PowerPoint Team easily before; today I am still trying to learn how to resize a picture on a slide.

Yes, I could read a $35 manual and figure it all out, but I have work to do. So Office 2003 is fine with me. (In fact, Office 97 was fine with me.)

This is a sea change in the world of computing.

Sometimes good enough is, indeed, good enough.

WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Check out Dell's IdeaStorm blog at www.ideastorm.com.

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James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company, and a computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com.