If we didn't know better, we'd say that Microsoft hates Windows XP these days, as many users are still choosing to stick with it and postpone the switch to Vista or Win 7 for as long as they can. Fortunately for the company, there are always ways to make the switch sooner rather than later, and the company yesterday announced that XP’s mainstream support phase has come to an end.

This basically means no more non-security-related hot fixes and no free support for Win XP users, but enterprise users’ extended support phase will last until April 8, 2014, which is plenty of time to upgrade to whatever Microsoft wants them to upgrade to.

We realize that switching to Vista and eventually Win 7 is of utmost importance to Microsoft, but we’d really appreciate if they could listen, and we mean really listen to their customers for once. The latest figures show that XP accounts for 62.9% global OS market share, whereas Vista is at 23.4%. Additionally, from May 2008 to March 2009, Vista snatched only 9% of XP’s share, which dropped from 72.12% to 62.9%.