Microsoft has struggled to convince users of Vista’s superiority to XP. And there continues to be a demand for the old OS. As of 1st July Windows XP is officially no longer being shipped by PC suppliers, but Dell have announced on their small business blog an ingenious way of downgrading to XP Pro after buying Vista. Gamers can also access the “bonus downgrade” for a fee of between $20 and $50. [Story from Internet News] As Will Smith remarks on the blog: shouldn’t Dell offer consumers what they are asking for, the ability to keep using what they perceive as a “superior product” - XP? Both Dell and Microsoft are playing a dangerous game by ignoring this level of consumer dissatisfaction.

Some scientists at Microsoft have applied to patent a method of recommending contacts in a social network. For social networking nerds it is worth looking at the claims and the prior art responses. Social networking is now close enough to the mainstream of web activity for this patent claim to represent a serious business opportunity. Some of the prior art appears persuasive.

XP - that stable, reliable operating system we have pretty much gotten used to - is going to be killed off in 73 days time, on 30th June. Windows users will then only have the choice of “upgrading” to Vista, an OS which has proved troublesome for pretty much all its users. You can sign the online petition to ask Microsoft to keep XP alive here. There are 153,000 so far.

[Update 25th April] Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced that if customers want XP Microsoft will keep offering it. According to CNet Ballmer added that no customers were asking for the OS to be reprieved “so far”.

Dell’s users have been thronging their new feedback site IdeaStorm demanding that Dell retain Windows XP as an option on new computers. They feel that Vista is a “young operating system with its own problems”. The post that requests XP be retained has received 13,328 endorsements. Dell offered to retain XP for business users earlier in the month. As of last week, Dell have agreed to reintroduce the XP option for home users as well.

This is a great endorsement of Dell’s social media strategy. Dell gets to hear from its customers directly what they want. Dell gives it to them. It’s as simple as that. It sounds obvious, but … listening to your customers is very good for your business.

Microsoft’s Live Search team have come up with a really cool piece of code (a search macro, in their terminology) which allows you to search a sub-group of sites all of whom are linked from a particular site. (A similar piece of code already allows you to track sites that link to a particular site) This is a very useful tool for a director of marketing or communications who wants to track the progress of an idea. O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest writes it up. Really useful stuff. Kudos to Microsoft.  As Joseph Hunkins pointed out, this is out-Googling Google.

It resonates with a lot of the interesting work we have been doing here at Market Sentinel. One of our observations is that a series of contextual links create what is, in effect, a focus group on a specific issue. Not a normal focus group, but an opted-in focus group, a focus group of experts.

The effects of this are very intriguing. For example we did some work recently looking at developments in social search. We found that we could look at the sites that were being disproportionately linked by the stakeholders in this topic - and realised that they were consistently identifying cutting edge technology developments ahead of the mainstream media. If I was working for a VC, or a technology company on the hunt for acquisitions, this would be information that would be of great interest to me. via John Battelle

The Seattle Post Intelligencer gives more details on Microsoft’s RSS support. Key features:

• The next version of the Internet Explorer browser will support RSS feeds (allowing reading and bookmarking);
• Microsoft with integrate RSS support into many of its products for the use of developers;
• There will be an aggregator product (details are a bit sketchy)

Some bloggers were negative, but Greg Rienacker from Newsgator and Dave Winer welcomed the announcement, on the grounds that it will grow the market.