
Windows XP will never die - twampss
http://www.tgdaily.com/software-brief/50631-windows-xp-will-never-die
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grellas
Our little firm just went through this issue, having had to replace aging
Windows XP computers used by our staff and being told by our IT guy and our
vendors for key software components that we use (Hummingbird for sophisticated
document management, Lexis for time and billing, calendaring, etc., and
others) that Windows 7 clients would be incompatible with our network setup
for a variety of reasons.

This meant either spending $10K or $20K for various small upgrades using
Windows XP clients or triple or quadruple that amount (or more) for doing a
global upgrade to Windows 7 for clients and attendant network components.
While it is nice to consider bringing everything up to date at once, no
business will do this without considering the cost/benefit aspects and, for us
anyway, this meant going with the more incremental changes and deferring the
more disruptive ones. The hardware aspects of these upgrades are pretty modest
in cost. But the expense of paying tech people to reconfigure everything gets
high pretty quickly.

Thus, the point made by the article is spot on, at least from this non-tech
user's perspective. I assume this will also help explain why it will be
comparatively hard to dislodge Microsoft from business-related markets
generally - no one wants to make radically disruptive changes on
infrastructure items unless they have to.

~~~
barnaby
That's a good summary. I'm going to encourage my competitors to keep thinking
like that. If I'm lucky they'll be sufficiently slowed down, and kept out of
touch with the market needs of most users (who will have kept upgrading) that
it won't be hard for me to eat their lunch.

~~~
carbocation
I suspect that this won't be a problem for grellas, whose company is his law
firm.

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ams6110
It's not as if XP is a particularly BAD system. If the minimal amount of UI
bling bothers you, it's easy to turn it off and have something that looks like
Windows 2000 Professional. It's stable, it runs all the software most
businesses need, and it more or less stays out of your way otherwise.

All this assumes that x86 (compatible) architectures will still be available
through 2020, something I think is not certain at all (and maybe this is what
MS is counting on in making this promise)

~~~
megablast
First thing I do is get rid of all the bling on xp or 7, make it look like
2000. 7 almost becomes useable with this, although it still annoyes the hell
out of me. When everything works, it is just fine, but when you need to go to
the control panel, or do anything out of the normal, you find Microsoft has
moves everything around just for the hell of it.

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cageface
Sounds like a defensive move to make sure nobody thinks too hard about
switching to Macs or Linux machines.

~~~
rubidium
Really? The cost comparison of switching to a mac or linux system vs. windows
7, infrastructure and tech support-wise, must be minimal for a large company.
Or am I missing something?

I think it has more to do with the fact that people are going to want to keep
XP for a long time, because it works for most business use (spreadsheets, word
docs, and the internet).

~~~
angstrom
It only makes sense if there's a competitive advantage to the upgrade. For the
vast majority of businesses there isn't. In that scenario the cost of sticking
with XP is actually a competitive advantage for those companies when the
economy is weak and budgets are tight. For tech companies it's not an issue
since tech is their business having the best is a competitive edge.

~~~
eli
This is exactly it. I think XP is the first desktop OS that was truly "good
enough" for typical, everyday business use.

Sure, Windows 7 is clearly a better OS... but is that going to make Company X
produce widgets any faster? Probably not enough to justify the cost of
licensing and upgrading to a new OS (and that's assuming that there are no
compatibility issues with e.g. that old timecard app the intern wrote in 2001)

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robryan
I guess the root of the problem is that no windows software maker, Microsoft
or otherwise, wants the initial loss of customers that would result in not
making it compatible with windows xp.

On my windows xp machine there hasn't been a single piece of software I've
wanted to use which wouldn't work without an upgrade. If there was something
key it probably would convince me to upgrade. I've used and don't mind windows
7 just there has been no compelling reason to change.

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bobbyi
I'm still seeing 2014 for extended support

[http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-
gb&C2=1173](http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173)

Is that the wrong page? Can someone provide where Microsoft is saying it's now
2020?

~~~
swilliams
Sigh... [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/xp-in-2020-not-even-close-
rea...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/xp-in-2020-not-even-close-read-the-
fine-print/2270)

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mooism2
And therefore Internet Explorer 6 will never die.

I know someone who still uses Windows ME.

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sliverstorm
It's interesting to see something we tend to think of as software winding up
in the same position as firmware; left alone to it's own devices and un-
upgraded, unless something is not working.

~~~
zrail
I know of some ten year old machines running critical SCADA control software
on top of Windows 2000. Those machines were never intended to be upgraded.
They're not even connected to the Internet, so I'd be surprised if they've
even been patched. They do their job with no fuss, so don't touch them.

They're approaching the point where the hardware could start failing any day
now, so they're on an upgrade path. This path is, not so surprisingly, very
expensive and fraught with politics about how the replacements should be
connected to the internet (hint: they shouldn't).

These things tend to happen a lot, we just don't hear about it very often.
Hell, where I work we're still running CentOS 4 on the vast majority of
machines because we know it works.

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known
In my compaq laptop I'm still running Windows 98

