Microsoft's old software comes back to haunt it
The good news: Microsoft's annual revenues clocked in at a record $51 billion for the just-ended fiscal year. The bad news? Windows XP, Microsoft's six-year-old operating system, will still account for more than one in five copies of Windows sold next year. Previously, Microsoft thought XP would only be 15 percent of the mix. XP sales, in other words, are 40 percent higher than Microsoft had predicted. That's the clearest sign yet that the millions of programmer-hours Microsoft threw into Vista have been largely wasted. Aside from the people getting Vista automatically — without any choice, really — with a new PC, there's just not a lot of demand. The "Wow" is no.