Windows XP — Home Windows Moves onto the NT Line

Windows XP was released on Thursday 25 October 2001, the day Microsoft held its launch event in New York and announced that XP was available on new PCs and in retail stores throughout the world. Japan was not in the first wave for the boxed product: the Japanese-language edition went on sale in Japanese shops on Friday 16 November 2001, about three weeks after the US. Microsoft's Japanese subsidiary had announced that date on 31 July.

The code was released to manufacturing on 24 August 2001. US estimated retail prices were $199 for Home Edition ($99 as an upgrade) and $299 for Professional ($199 as an upgrade).

The dates

Microsoft said XP was short for "experience", standing for the richer experiences Windows and Office could offer by embracing Web services. Office XP was named on the same day.

Why the Japanese date was different

According to @IT's report at the time, 16 November was the day the retail packages reached Japanese shops, not a fixed date for XP-preinstalled PCs. Microsoft said it did not tie PC makers to a launch date and that each would ship when ready, so some XP machines could appear before 16 November. Microsoft Japan planned to aim its marketing at consumers until the launch and then switch to business buyers ahead of the March 2002 fiscal year-end.

Expected Japanese shop prices (open pricing), as reported by PC Watch on 19 September 2001:

Home Windows joins the NT line

Before XP, Windows had two lines. Home users ran the line that descended from Windows 95; businesses ran Windows NT and then Windows 2000. Microsoft's announcement of 13 February 2001 said XP was built on the enhanced Windows 2000 engine. In other words, the foundation of the home product — including the kernel, the core of the operating system that manages memory and processes — now came from the NT line.

There were two products. Windows XP Professional was for business users and Windows XP Home Edition for home users. The launch-day release described Professional as including all the features of Home Edition plus remote access, security, performance, manageability and multilingual features.

The look changed too. In February Microsoft called the new visual design the most significant update to the Windows interface since Windows 95. The features it put up front were about digital life: copying pictures from a camera or scanner and sharing them, building a music collection and moving it to portable players, editing home movies and playing DVDs, and letting a friend or expert connect to your PC to help with a problem.

Launch day in New York

The launch was held at the Marriott Marquis Theatre in Times Square, with Bill Gates giving the keynote. It took place six weeks after the attacks of 11 September, and Microsoft's release noted a special welcome from Mayor Rudy Giuliani. There were 62 launch events across the US and more than 50 elsewhere in the world.

On enterprise adoption, Microsoft said 150,000 desktops had already been deployed and more than a million more were committed. Those are Microsoft's figures.

Service Pack 2: the security rebuild

What changed XP's reputation most was Service Pack 2, almost three years after launch. Microsoft announced its release to manufacturing on 6 August 2004. It was a free update that, in Microsoft's words, established stronger default security settings and added new protection features.

• A new Windows Security Center showed at a glance whether the firewall, Automatic Updates and antivirus software were on and up to date
• Support for newer technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth was updated, with a focus on security
• Microsoft planned to localise it into 25 languages over two months and expected to deliver it to about 100 million PCs through Automatic Updates
• Users without a reliable connection could order a free CD

At launch XP had been sold on new experiences. SP2 was about making the defaults safe, and it is part of the reason XP lasted as long as it did.

A long life, and the end

The next version, Windows Vista, reached consumers on 30 January 2007. Comparing the Japanese editions, that was about five years and two months after XP, as ITmedia noted; SP2 was the main update in between. Windows 7 followed Vista in 2009.

Microsoft's lifecycle data shows mainstream support for XP ending on 14 April 2009 and extended support on 8 April 2014. Machines that kept running XP after that date became a recurring point of comparison when Windows 10 reached end of support.

For the wider Windows story see the Microsoft timeline and the operating systems timeline; for the company, see Microsoft.