Microsoft announced on Tuesday that support for three versions of Windows Vista, including the most expensive, will be limited to a period of five years instead of the usual ten, reports Computerworld's Gregg Keizer.

Vista Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate editions are affected by the announcement. These versions will stop receiving updates, including security updates, after April 10, 2012. This five-year period is half of the usual ten years expected from the Redmond, WA software giant.

The move fuels speculation that the company is not seeing a rush to its newest operating system version -- an observation borne out by Gearwire many times over the past few weeks. Coming as it does on the heels of an announcment lengthening support for Windows XP Home and XP Media Center, the music world is now wondering if Vista may be another Windows ME.

The idea that Microsoft could misstep in this way, first brought up by Gearwire's Joe Wallace in his recent interview with Rain Recording's Bill Paschick, may not be far-fetched. While it's true that ME and Vista are not easily compared (the former being an incremental release and the latter being a major rework of the flagship OS product) the slow adoption of Vista-native technologies by audio hardware makers has already caught our attention. This announcement, coupled with the announcement of extended XP support tells us that Microsoft sees lots of XP in its future.