Users are drumming up petitions, blog posts, and Web sites aimed at trying to convince Microsoft to continue support for Windows XP, which Microsoft plans to discontinue on new computers beginning June 30.

CNN reports:

Take, for instance, Galen Gruman. A longtime technology journalist, Gruman is more accustomed to writing about trends than starting them.

But after talking to Windows users for months, he realized his distaste for Vista and strong attachment to XP were widespread.

"It sort of hit us that, wait a minute, XP will be gone as of June 30. What are we going to do?" he said. "If no one does something, it's going to be gone."

So Gruman started a Save XP Web petition, gathering since January more than 100,000 signatures and thousands of comments, mostly from die-hard XP users who want Microsoft to keep selling it until the next version of Windows is released, currently targeted for 2010.

At the end of this year, almost 60% of consumer PCs and 70% of business PCs worldwide will still run XP.

Microsoft is foolish to discontinue XP, given the ongoing demand for the product. There's no downside to Microsoft to continue to support XP, as long as it can keep charging users for it. It's got a product with considerable customer loyalty -- why is it creating a problem for itself when it could be making this into an opportunity?