
Intel blames $1B revenue hit on Windows XP's stubborn grip - themark
http://www.cnet.com/news/intels-revenue-outlook-hurt-by-soft-business-pc-demand/
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rogerbinns
They neglected to mention just how hard it is to "upgrade" from XP. If you
want to install Windows 7 or 8 then it will only do a clean install. You have
to figure out all the apps you have installed, install media,
receipts/keys/vendor site logins, do the "upgrade", and then play system
administrator for a long time. Approximately no one has backups, so all that
needs to be sorted out too, as well as doing a restoration.

Then new UI has to be learned. Nothing is where it was. Various apps probably
had to be upgraded too, and they'll have new UI to learn too. Then they have
to figure out system administration - how do you do updates, make the funky
printer work, deal with anti-virus. I didn't even mention figuring out that
whole 32 versus 64 bits thing either.

The time, effort and money involved, especially for small
businesses/organisations and individuals is daunting, not to mention a
distraction from what their actual business is. By far the easiest thing for
them is to do nothing.

Microsoft really screwed up by not making a good upgrade process. They know
how to do it, and did it in the past.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14)

~~~
thaumaturgy
For people in this situation, there's a product called PCMover from Laplink
which we've used successfully on a lot of migrations. It can do XP -> 7, with
documents, settings, and installed software, usually with almost no trouble at
all. It's well worth the 50 bucks or so.

Unfortunately, the product has a bug that completely kills software updates in
Windows 8 systems, and even after we had purchased dozens of licenses of their
software and gone to the trouble of narrowing down the scope of the bug to a
"definitely a PCMover bug" range, their support personnel refused to look into
it and pretty much told us to take or leave their product.

So we quit using it, since we're trying to get all of our XP-using customers
to skip 7 and go directly to 8.

But yeah, it's a much bigger pain in the butt for a lot of people than a lot
of people seem to realize.

~~~
rogerbinns
Microsoft also have an "Windows Easy Transfer" \-
[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows7/products/feature...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows7/products/features/windows-easy-transfer) \- but read the FAQ to
find out that it doesn't transfer apps.

In addition to doing an upgrade, users also have to use some other random
pieces of software which may be paid, and not a single one will guarantee that
your new system will be like your old one. Still a very hard sell.

~~~
walterbell
Intel and Microsoft could make it easy for desktop customers to move to a new
desktop and use their old hard drive to run Windows XP in a virtual machine,
alongside Windows 10 which includes Hyper-V.

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jinushaun
The problem is that Vista specs required a new machine so users didn't
upgrade, then 7 fixed the spec issues, but MS didn't support a direct software
upgrade path from XP to 7. Their official recommendation is back up your shit
and do a clean install. I suspect that for a lot of XP users, XP was peak
compute and they didn't feel a need to upgrade while their computer still
worked. These are Luddites and you shouldn't simply dismiss them. This is
compounded by the fact that XP users buying a computer today will get Windows
8, which will completely confuse them. MS dug their own grave.

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jessaustin
This explanation _might_ have made sense in explaining sluggish sales of Vista
and 7 machines (if indeed such sales were sluggish). Now that people are
getting into 10, it strains credulity a bit to blame poor results for _this
specific quarter_ on customers' hanging onto XP. Is this truly the first time
Intel have noticed this phenomenon? If they've seen it in previous quarters,
why did it surprise them this time?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Extended support for Windows XP ended in 2014. All the XP holdouts were
expected to have to buy new hardware because Windows 7 is a lot less usable
than Windows XP on a Pentium 4 with 1GB of memory. But it seems they haven't.

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bsder
How about "it's impossible to upgrade from Windows XP for many users".

Since Vista broke the hardware drivers, many people simply can't upgrade. Once
the drivers were broken, you can't upgrade to _anything_ newer.

Now, throw into the mix that Windows 8 is a disaster (try running 5 copies in
an office behind a 512Kbps link to the internet--watch them all choke your
bandwidth to zero), and Microsoft _already_ quit issuing new licenses for
Windows 7 (which was actually decent) and anyone with 2 brain cells is going
to ask "Why the hell should I upgrade given that Microsoft is just going to
fuck me over. Again."

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jhallenworld
Lack of NTVDM on 64-bit systems is kind of a big issue too (yes, I know
long_mode does not support real mode, but they could have provided an
emulator).

I could just keep running 32-bit XP, or I could pay money and do a lot of
extra work, hmm..

~~~
Sanddancer
They make 32 bit versions of 7 and 8 which support real mode.

~~~
yuhong
It wasn't until Win8 that they finally disabled NTVDM by default in fact.

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vvpan
And the lesson is that making things that last isn't good for the business.

~~~
ComputerGuru
That's not the point at all. I'd say the lesson is to understand what your
customers want and not fight them on it.

The first iPhone is as usable today as Windows XP is. The difference is that
the features present in its successors (and the features NOT taken away) were
enough to make the users upgrade (or, depending on your perspective, bad
enough to make them jump ship).

This isn't me defending Apple or putting down Micrsoft. We might see this in
the next few years with MacBooks or the iPhone as the perceived quality of OS
X declines. My own wife won't let me buy her a new iPhone because she is happy
with iOS 6.

~~~
supergeek133
Or people hear in the news how bad the new version is (e.g. Vista) and avoid
it.

Changing operating systems, especially in the PC world, is very disruptive to
users. Especially non-savvy ones.

The hell I went through when my mom got a new PC with Windows 8.

I can't imagine Windows 10.

~~~
sp332
I've been running the Windows 10 preview, and it looks like Windows 8 with a
better window manager.

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jchimney
many people being happy with just a smart phone or tablet running a non-intel
chip might have something to do with it as well

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ForHackernews
I wonder if Microsoft could put out some kind "Windows XP+" that would be a
modernized-but-basically-identical XP release, that added things like better
64 bit support, drivers for modern storage systems, etc. but left the
interface and features people like alone.

Failing that, have any third-parties made an XP-skin for Windows 7?

~~~
mixmastamyk
[http://www.classicshell.net/](http://www.classicshell.net/)

is kinda that, though it isn't "XP enough" for my tastes.

