30,000 Rally to Save Windows XP

An online petition to save the dated operating system has gained a surprising amount of support from consumers who don't want to be forced into buying Vista.

We’ve seen petitions to save whales, turtles, eagles, TV shows, school dances, and now, an operating system. The Vista-hating editors over at InfoWorld have fired up a campaign to save their beloved Windows XP, which Microsoft currently has slated for demise on June 30. The surprising part: they’ve gathered over 30,000 signatures in less than a week.

The Save Windows XP campaign launched on Sunday with a special section on the InfoWorld site, a blog, a list of reasons to keep XP, and of course, a petition. InfoWorld reported on Tuesday that the list had already gained 12,500 signatures, and the momentum has seemingly continued, bringing that number to 30,000 as of Thursday evening.

While there’s no guarantee the petition will actually be able to save the OS, InfoWorld executive editor Galen Gruman remains optimistic about the possibility of change. “In the past, Microsoft has responded to customer dissatisfaction and changed its plans, so there’s reason to believe it will listen today if the message is loud enough,” he said in a separate InfoWorld article.

Custom complaints have already driven the date of XP’s execution back once, from January 2008 to its current date in June. Although that’s the last date consumers will be able to go out and pick up a retail version of XP for themselves, Microsoft plans to allow system builders access to the operating system until January 30 2009.