There's been a lot of speculation recently about whether Microsoft will release a major update to Windows 11 this year, or whether the company will take an even bigger leap and launch "Windows 12." However, 23 years ago today, Microsoft didn't keep us waiting or guessing about the next version of the operating system. On February 5, 2001, the company officially announced that it would launch Windows XP in the second half of the year.
At the time, Microsoft admitted in a press release about Windows XP that the operating system was previously developed under the codename "Whistler." As we mentioned in our earlier review of the history of Windows XP, Microsoft initially separated its consumer and business Windows teams into separate divisions. However, in 2000, Microsoft decided to merge the two divisions into one to jointly develop Whistler, eventually bringing the Windows NT kernel to consumer versions and abandoning the old MS-DOS architecture.
So where did the final name "WindowsXP" come from? Microsoft is trying to move away from the date-based Windows naming system that started with Windows 95 and continued with Windows 98. However, Microsoft used the Windows 2000 name for its commercial version of the operating system, forcing the company to name the next consumer version Windows Millenium, or Windows Me for short.
So for the next operating system version, Microsoft adopted Windows XP, which the company calls short for "eXPerience." Both the consumer version (Home Edition) and the business version (Professional Edition) of the operating system will use the "XP" name. The company will eventually release several different versions of XP. Among them, the Windows
The XP brand isn't just for Windows. Microsoft has also decided to use the name for the next version of its Office suite. Yes, we also replaced the previous "Office10" with OfficeXP in 2001.
Incidentally, the company launched its first Xbox game console the same year Windows XP and Office XP were launched.
23 years ago today, the release of Windows XP and Office XP was a very important turning point in Microsoft's history. XP eventually brought huge success to the company, even surpassing Windows 95 in size. The success of Windows XP also comes from the fact that Microsoft took longer to release the next version of its operating system, Windows Vista.
More than five years passed between the releases of XP and Vista (generally available in January 2007). Then, Vista ended up not being popular with PC users, Windows XP's support period was extended, and Microsoft tried to release Windows 7, which was released in late 2009.
Microsoft finally ended official support for Windows XP in April 2014, more than 12 years after it was launched in the fall of 2001. Ironically, due to the failure of Microsoft's Windows 8/8.1 operating system, Windows 7 ended up having a fairly long support life.
According to the latest data from Statcounter, nearly 10 years after Windows XP ended its official support period, 0.57% of Windows-based PCs are still running Windows XP. This means that there are probably still a large number of computers running this operating system that was officially released more than two decades ago.