XP SP3 to Get Slice of Windows Live Wave 4, but Not as Windows 7 or Vista

Microsoft is making no secret of the fact that the latest release of Windows Live will be tailored to Windows 7 and Windows Vista, while not supporting Windows XP at all. The Redmond company’s position is of course that the operating system released back in 2001 is obsolete, despite the Service Pack 2 and Service Pack 3 releases, and that Windows Live Wave 4 is optimized for the new technologies that ship by default with Windows 7 and Windows Vista, such as DirectX 11. And yet, users still running XP SP3 will get a slice of Windows Live Wave 4, but not of the clients packaged under the Windows Live Essentials brand umbrella.

“We know many customers use Windows XP and are happy with their experience, and of course we will continue to support our current release of Windows Live Essentials on XP and the new versions all of our web-based services (including Hotmail and SkyDrive) will run on XP,” Chris Jones, corporate vice president of the Windows Live Experience, noted. (via LiveSide)

What XP SP3 customers won’t be getting will be Windows Live clients such as Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, etc. In order to take advantage of Windows Live Wave 4 instant messaging, the mail client and additional Essentials applications, users will have to be running either Windows Vista or Windows 7. However, with Microsoft committed to continuing providing support for Windows Live Essentials Wave 3, users will at least get the chance to perform a smooth transition.

“Windows XP is nearly 10 years old and simply doesn’t provide the same level of platform support for graphics, and we recognized early in our work on Wave 4 that we could do much more in our software on a modern graphics platform. As a result our new version of Essentials will require the new graphics platform and controls that are only available on Windows 7 or Windows Vista and therefore will only run on these platforms. So if you are happy with XP, you can keep running the current version of Windows Live and our new services. When you move to Windows 7 and Windows Vista, we will have a new version that will let you do more on a modern platform,” Jones added.