
Millions in Asia still on Windows XP - ssreeniv
http://visual.ly/millions-asia-still-windows-xp
======
bruceb
For the avg user that only needs internet, office, and music/movies Windows XP
is good enough. What does Vista/7/8 offer a person using a Pentium 4 level
computer? Nothing really worth paying for.

I am surprised MS doesn't get more credit for XP which could be seen as a
relativity dependable workhorse. Problem is for MS of course they ended the
need for the users to upgrade.

~~~
freehunter
Improved security is a major feature that most people should care about (but
they don't).

~~~
kunil
If my computer is letting me to play solitaire on my free time, I don't care
which bot net it is contributing on its free time

~~~
Houshalter
Until it steals your important data, or crashes your system, or sets your
laptop on fire from maxing out your cpu for bitcoin mining.

Depends on the specific malware obviously.

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microcolonel
Of course these users would likely be well served(for the most part) by a
GNU/Linux distribution, and with many of them the difference between XP and
Windows 8 may be greater than the differences between XP and a typical CentOS
installation, or even some of the more adventurous environments. The great
thing is, in relation to the concerns Microsoft has put on this infographic,
Windows 8 is not the natural choice.

~~~
bluedino
Except that they wouldn't - software incompatibility, browser
incompatibility... It's similar to getting grandma to run Linux.

~~~
omh
Software incompatibility certainly. But I don't think most people will notice
browser compatibility issues if they move to Firefox or Chrome on Linux.

~~~
Ergomane
Why do so many commenters on tech sites believe "mum" or "grandpa" only run a
browser?

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ck2
Not just Asia, I've yet to find something that I need beyond XP for, and the
US government uses XP everywhere.

(though Firefox lack of mpeg4 support is annoying because we don't have
windows media foundation on XP)

Will grudgingly look at Windows 7 in 2014 when security fixes cease.

~~~
danielbarla
One example: (As far as I know,) XP doesn't have TRIM support, and this makes
SSDs on that platform far less less attractive.

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omh
What on earth does it mean to say "Windows XP with SP3 is 56.5 times more
vulnerable than Windows 8 RTM" ?

I guess it's this some attempt to quantify how often XP machines get infected
vs Windows 8. But a good part of that is probably because XP users are less
technically proficient than the kind of people who've upgraded to 8.

If you're a CTO for a business then most of these details probably don't
matter. All they really need to say is "no more updates next year, so soon
you'll be directly vulnerable".

~~~
dublinben
According to Microsoft's research, 11.3% of Windows XP computers are infected
compared to 0.2% of Windows 8_64 computers. That's 56.5 times more infected.

[http://blogs.technet.com/b/security/archive/2013/08/06/the-r...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/security/archive/2013/08/06/the-
risk-of-running-windows-xp-after-support-ends.aspx)

~~~
omh
Thanks for the source.

I think using that that something is "more vulnerable" is misleading though.
Do we really think that 8_32 is 4 times more vulnerable than 8_64? Isn't it
more likely that 64-bit users are less likely to run random malware?

Of course I definitely agree that XP is "less secure" and everyone should be
planning to move away from it. But for a well-managed corporate network it
just doesn't seem like such a big deal as MS are making out.

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namecast
South Korea's dependence on Windows seems to continue; I wonder how much is
related to SEED, the weird crypto-via-ActiveX implementation that's held them
hostage all these years.
([http://kanai.net/weblog/archive/2007/01/26/00h53m55s](http://kanai.net/weblog/archive/2007/01/26/00h53m55s))

~~~
mmagin
That post is from 2007, are they STILL stuck with this?

~~~
namecast
Yep. It's hard to make that sort of hack just 'go away' without sunsetting
most of Korea's e-commerce sites. At least as of last year, it was important
enough to be mentioned as an election issue in Nov. 2012:

[http://www.geek.com/news/korean-presidential-hopeful-
pledges...](http://www.geek.com/news/korean-presidential-hopeful-pledges-to-
end-internet-explorer-monopoly-1528451/)

------
mmagin
The simple truth is that corporate users tend to be very cautious about
upgrading (and who can blame your average IT department for its conservatism)
and many individual users only upgrade when they buy a new PC.

In my feeling, by analogy, Windows 2000 was like when they first put modern
electronic ignitions and truly reliable fuel injection in passenger cars
(making a whole class of maintenance and problems a thing of the past). Now
it's just like buying the latest boring mid-sized sedan with slightly
different styling.

For me, Mac OS X, ten years ago, was like getting a Tesla. Desktop OSes have
become such a commodity since then though.

As much as I don't like the iOS model and its restrictions and business model,
it's probably the first serious innovation in "desktop" OS products in a
while.

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sandGorgon
That's funny - I wonder why we dont see any stats for India, definitely one of
the largest markets.

sidenote: For those that believe that these guys can upgrade to Linux, that
will only happen on the basis of a single piece of software - Excel. And no,
OO/LibreO is not good enough.

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brianbarker
Asia is not stuck on XP because it's more or less secure. Asia is stuck on XP
simply because of piracy (which kind of seems to argue it's less secure, but
anyway).

Most people over there are running pirated XP. I worked at a company that had
Asian partners and we found even legitimate companies over there had office
consoles on Pirated XP. That was a shock to us.

The really shitty downside of this is most users are using IE8 or lower and
sometimes newer versions of .NET couldn't be used in our software builds.
Business dudes always wanted us to design our web pages to appease these
customers, which became increasingly difficult as technology goes forth.

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asadotzler
It's not just Asia. Firefox has a global population of hundreds of millions of
users and our data says that ~30% of the WORLD is still on XP.

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scriptstar
I just finished a project where I worked as a front-end lead developer using
HTML5, CSS3, jquery, bootstrap, backbone.js and all I had was a trusted XP
machine provided by my employer. It was fine and I don't see any point in this
argument. Unless you are doing an earth shattering and mind numbing things.
Honestly developers can live and work well with XP machine. I am the living
proof.

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devx
The Chinese government should try and switch the Chinese faster to the new
national OS, Ubuntu.

[http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/ubuntu-to-become-the-
offi...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/ubuntu-to-become-the-official-os-
of-china)

~~~
nols
Faster? It's taking the French Gendarmerie a decade to transition to Ubuntu.
It'll take much much longer to transition the Chinese government to Ubuntu (if
that ever happens). The first linux distro designed to be used by the Chinese
government was developed in 2001, and UbuntuKylin is a loose continuation of
that, so we'll see how that goes.

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cpeterso
Mozilla continues to support Firefox on Windows XP precisely because of XP's
huge install base in Asia. It is a struggle, though, because Microsoft would
rather not spend any time or money supporting XP with Visual Studio's
toolchain.

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yashg
And those users don't care for support or security updates. Majority are not
using the genuine Windows anyway and Vista/7/8 don't really provide anything
extra to a regular user over XP.

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nness
This is likely due to privacy; particularly in countries like China.

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thecolorblue
It has been my experience that small businesses, from book stores to car
dealership, still use windows xp a lot. As soon as you put a price tag on
upgrading its out of the question.

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RRRA
Time to upgrade to GNU/Linux! :)

~~~
bgroins
I could just imagine that conversation with my CTO...

Me: CTO, we're switching to Linux instead of Windows 7

CTO: Great! How much functionality will we lose with our applications?

Me: All of it!

CTO: Let's do it!

~~~
xutopia
What do you mean "all of it"?

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AndrewDucker
All of the custom internal applications written over the last decade or so
that provide vital business functionality, I'd have thought.

~~~
bgroins
Yep. I work at a hospital so switching to Linux would impact 100% of our
applications.

I understand the desire (especially on HN) to switch to Linux, but it's just
not a plausible solution for most institutions. It sounds great in theory if
you don't think about how all of our end user applications are running on
Windows, have specialized hardware and drivers, not to mention people love the
shit out of MS Office.

