What's Keeping You On XP? 879
Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Windows XP lost more than 11 percent of its share from September to December 2011, to post a December average of 46.5 percent, a new low for the aged OS as users have gotten Microsoft's message that the operating system should be retired. Figures indicate that Windows 7 will become the most widely used version in April, several months earlier than previous estimates. Two months ago, as Microsoft quietly celebrated the 10th anniversary of XP's retail launch, the company touted the motto 'Standing still is falling behind' to promote Windows 7 and demote XP. In July, Microsoft told customers it was 'time to move on' from XP, reminding everyone that the OS would exit all support in April 2014. Before that, the Internet Explorer team had dismissed XP as the 'lowest common denominator' when they explained why it wouldn't run IE9. The deadline for ditching Windows XP is in April 2014, when Microsoft stops patching the operating system. 'Enterprises don't want to run an OS when there's no security fixes,' says Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Research rejecting the idea that Microsoft would extend the end-of-life date for Windows XP to please the 10% who have no plans to leave the OS. 'The longer they let them run XP, the more enterprises will slow down their migration.'"
Corporate Politcy (Score:5, Informative)
When you have a large organization Thousand+ employees it takes time to make sure the upgrade goes smooth.
Re:Ya what dicks! (Score:4, Informative)
... the only successful big products we've launched are Windows and Office. We have to force business users to adopt it ...
They support all their OSes for 10 years from release minimum. XP has been extended 3 years past that. That is quite reasonable
Actually, you are both right. Support for XP has been more than generous and acceptable. However, MS is indeed in the business of developing a new OS and wanting to get everyone on their previous versions onto it. Now, given the utter debarcle that was Vista, I think they have at least learned that it must be an acceptable standard and will continue to try to get it decent. Having said that, their business model will always remain on getting customers who continue to buy new OS, rather than making an OS and making enough profit from the sales without needing to get extra sales.
Re:Because it's fast (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Money (Score:5, Informative)
For me it isn't about money. Since I have built my own machines for the past 20 years OS updates are optional for me. I pretty much have to use Microsoft on my main machine for the occasional games and nothing in Vista or 7 have really struck me as necessary.
I suspect this will be the last time I can reuse my XP install though. It is very possible that the next video card update I do wont support XP.
Re:Nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Many corporations and government organizations have stringent security requirements. Everything must be tested and approved. Security plans must be written the spell out everything on the network. This work is very time consuming and expensive to upgrade all computers. Thus I'd expect slow adoption and inertia. One could argue that updating to the latest will result in better security, but not always and bureaucracy is rarely logical.
Re:Hazard (Score:4, Informative)
That very much depends upon how you define "safe enough". There are known, unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows XP. See Secunia's advisory database [secunia.com] for examples. Furthermore, XP's defensive capabilities are outdated. I'm certainly not arguing that newer platforms are invulnerable, but they benefit from technologies and practices that have been created or honed over the last decade. At an even lower level than DEP, ASLR and the like, Windows 7 does a far better job of handling privilege separation, which goes a long way in mitigating risk from vulnerabilities. I personally prefer Linux, but I know better than to advocate switching to everyone. Windows Vista and Windows 7 still represent marked improvements over Windows XP, even now while the patches for XP are still coming.
Re:Money (Score:5, Informative)
How cheap are we talking? I just built my parents a computer for about $160.
Works just fine running Windows 7 Ultimate. You can bump those specs generously by bringing the price up to $200, which is still pretty cheap for a brand new computer that doesn't have to run a decade old operating system.
Re:Nothing (Score:2, Informative)
I work for a state government and our vendors are just now releasing versions which support Windows 7. We now to need to schedule the upgrade, that will take 6-9 monthes assuming they can start the process right away. Then we're typically one of their largest customers, so I'm sure they'll say the migration worked fine and we'll find problems which last time took about 9 monthes to resolve and only when they released a newer version just for us.
Re:TweakUI, no Breadcrumbs, usable control panel (Score:5, Informative)
I hated 7 too until I found http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Now, I'm more or less happy as a clam. There are still some annoyances that I needed to work around through heavy modifications, but at least now it looks 90%+ like XP was.
Re:Nothing (Score:5, Informative)
At work...well, I can't see us getting off XP until 2013 at the earliest. Nobody, but nobody wants the hassles of upgrading ten years of software applications written for a 20,000 seat enterprise and targeted to XP. It has to happen, but we don't want it.
Re:Money (Score:3, Informative)
You forgot the $250 cost of Win 7 Ultimate.
Re:Nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not being accused of being a thief (Score:1, Informative)
WGA is also in windows XP. Additionally, a while back MS stopped letting you speak with humans when you call their "I promise I'm not a theif" hotline. When I tired to reinstall XP on a box for someone I spend 2 hours trying to get MS to "authorized" it. Finally while on hold I spend 5 minutes on the web and found a tool to just break the WGA so I could use the damn OEM XP that she bought with with the thing.
ASLR (Score:5, Informative)
Windows XP does not support ASLR, which is a powerful exploit mitigation feature. That is, given a vulnerability (which are pretty abundant in the software that we use), ASLR does a good job of preventing a large class of them from being able to be leveraged to run code (like install malware, keylogger, etc.).
Windows 7 does ASLR, which makes you less likely to get exploited by vulnerabilities.
Re:Nothing (Score:4, Informative)
But Microsoft doesn't want to deal with this. With the release of Windows 8, they will have four (semi-)separate code bases (XP, Vista, 7, 8) to keep secure. That's a coding nightmare that nobody wants. If Microsoft can get everyone on the same OS, then their costs of producing patches drops to a quarter of what it once was.
Re:If It's Not Broken... (Score:5, Informative)
Sloppy Programming. (Score:5, Informative)
In my limited experience with these things it's not future-proofing that's the issue. It LAZY, SLOPPY PROGRAMMING that's the #1 issue. Developers who learned how to do something bad in the Win9x days, and kept doing it well into the WinXP days... and beyond.
A couple of years ago I had to deal with booking software at an agency. The entire function of this software was hooking into an SQL database. However, it REQUIRED local admin rights simply to RUN. It wouldn't run AT ALL on Vista or 7.
Why? Because it wanted to write files to a program directory. What files? I'm not really that certain. However, this was the way things were done in the Win3.1 day, devs continued lazily doing it in the Win9x days, and WinXP merely tolerated it. Vista slammed that practice to the floor. So, rather than clean up their code an adopt proper coding practices, they just said to us "You have to use it on XP on an account with local admin rights. We're not fixing that issue."
As an addendum, given local admin rights, let's just say it's hard to tell interns "Don't install things."
Bah humbug! (Score:5, Informative)
The reasons for using XP are obviously:
(1) Additional hardware requirements
(2) Software incompatibility, including, but not limited to:
(a) Existing vertical market apps glued together with Visual BASIC
(b) Inability to run already purchased copies of Office on the new OS
(c) Inability to run already purchased other programs
(d) Lack of driver support for older hardware
(i) what sane printer maker is going to port a driver for their 4 year old model with broken toner/ink DRM to a new OS?
(ii) many hardware companies are out of business yet/because the hardware they made is still working fine
(3) Buying into putting all your machines online so they can phone the mothership and download god knows what
(a) Worked like a charm for the automated checkout registers at Lucky's, didn't it? Get your new Visa/BofA ATM card yet?
(b) Once it's working, leave it the hell alone; I don't need an auto-update of IE on my server/POS/home system with firefox/Chrome on it
(c) an offline machine gathers no worms
(4) There's simply no significant value proposition, unless you consider "Ooooh! Shiiiiny!" a value proposition
Get over it: Good enough is the enemy of better, particulary if (better - good enough) == nothing useful to me.
-- Terry