Talk about cannibalizing sales from Windows Vista. It's bad enough Microsoft has to worry about XP doing that, but ...


All right, all right, obviously we're just kidding. And yes, you read that right. Windows for Workgroups (WFW) 3.11 is still being sold. Microsoft is selling it in the Embedded Channel. However, in a blog post on Thursday, Microsoft announced that as of November 1st, that venerable old OS would go the way of the dodo.

As John Coyne announced in the blog post:

for those that were not aware, we recently announced that effective November 1st, 2008, OEM's will no longer be able to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel. Now we all know that it's been long gone in the standard (retail/OEM) channel, but one of the unique things in the embedded business is that we allow the classic OS products to be sold longer than the other channels. it's *finally the end of an era!

WFW was Microsoft's final English language operating system prior to the release of Windows 95. Initially released in November 1993, it added features such as TrueType fonts and native TCP/IP access. It was also the first Windows OS to include Minesweeper, which is still around today.