An anonymous source at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters revealed today how the software giant plans to release Windows XP as the successor to the ill-fated Vista operating system in the next decade.

“User’s want choice and Microsoft will offer customers the choice of a mandatory upgrade cycle which will deliver value to the end user and a greater end user experience. Part of that experience will include the launch of Windows XP as the next generation operating system in 2010 and will replace Windows Vista as our flagship product.”

“We have listened to customers that have told us that they would like a responsive GUI that can offer productivity gains over Windows Vista technology. In particular, usability tests have shown that Vista’s “preparing to copy - calculating” feature, which gave the users the option to go and make a cup of tea whilst the underlying OS took 5 minutes to decide how long it would take to copy those two 4 kilobyte text files, are not proving to be the win we expected. Instead we shall revert to our patented MS-DOS technology which can perform the same task in a fraction of the time. A patent which Linux infringes.”

“Additionally we will be removing the patented ‘99 OK Click’ security functionality security feature that Vista introduced as many users asked how security was improved by providing an OK click without requesting any password. We just saw some kind of similar feature when we visited our friends at Novell called ‘su ‘and ‘sudo’ and we thought our users would also like that. But we also knew that they wouldn’t like entering passwords. This was borne out through extensive usability testing with rabbits in our lab scenarios. The rabbits also suggested that they liked the idea of a ribbon when working with the office programs. We were determined to deliver such productivity gains and value, not only to these rabbits, but also sheep and other users of our products.”

“We found Windows XP to be the most efficient way to deliver these gains to our users through a familiar and proven user interface as well as harnessing our synergies across the Windows brand. The good news for users is that through our software assurance policy means that their subscription plan will cover the licencing cost for the XP upgrade - unless its release gets delayed like Windows Vista. Existing Windows XP licence holders will only have to pay the licence fee one more time in order to continue to use their product.”

Rumour also has it that Microsoft are already even planning the next OS release after Windows XP which will be in 2015. The provisional codename for it is to be “Long Horn, Short Memory” and it is expected that it will be built on the Windows 3.1 codebase that delivered such rich functionality through much of the nineties…