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One Year Later, "Dead" XP Still Going Strong
snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."
This trend will stop when Windows 7 is introduce.
Mark it on the wall.
After we took a look at Vista, Who Knew XP would look so good? Actually XP was never "bad", and it's pretty stable considering all the garbage people install on their PCs. Although people say (in surveys) that they don't like "renting" their OS software, I (and my corporate clients) wouldn't mind at all paying a yearly fee for ongoing maintenance of XP, or, perhaps for a new 3 or 5-year license with "support". And since the Web is so good for self-support for some time now, we would just be looking for maintenance releases and security updates. And we already "rent" many of our applications, from security suites to corporate apps with support. Microsoft would benefit because they would effectively get "us" to be purchasing OS licenses just the same as if we bought Windows 7 (or whatever). The resellers would be losers of course, coz we wouldn't be buying so much new hardware, but that's not especially "our" problem. For business use, anything over 1.6 GHz (sometimes even slower!)/512MB RAM or so is just icing on the cake for XP. It runs pretty well in that minimum configuration. It would be much cheaper than a change to a new version of Windows. And it does EVERYTHING we need, doesn't it? ARE YOU LISTENING, MICROSOFT?
Clearly, Microsoft used worcestershire sauce as an embalming fluid.
I've been defending Vista for some time now since it worked just fine on my laptop. Now, however some sort of incompatibility between Vista, Firefox and Zone Alarm keeps freezing my browser. It's not happening on my XP systems. And suddenly, within the past couple of weeks, even IE is freezing. So I'm building a new system for my wife and be sure that I'm going with XP.
"the most successful version of windows ever sold"
sold (or really licensed) != used
The user base is never the same size as sales or downloads.
Developers: We can use your help.
Can we do away with the "XP still alive" stories? At this point "everyone" knows that people are going to continue using XP for as long as possible. The other people with Software Assurance or other Microsoft volume licensing programs are going to stay on XP just until they can plan a migration to Windows 7. A small minority will finally make the shift to Linux, and a couple people will slurp up the Jobs flavored Kool-Aid and justify spending significant amounts of money to be locked into a completely proprietary hardware/software "solution".
XP is going to die rather quickly once one or more of the following happen: 2.5TB or bigger hard disks drop below $100 (no GUID partition table support in XP), applications make good use of more than 4GB RAM (XP64 driver support "could be better"), USB3 devices become available in mass quantities (no USB3 support in XP), IPv4 addresses run out and major ISPs offer IPv6 access (IPv6 support in XP is incomplete and lacks a UI), Duke Nukem Forever is released for Windows 7 only.
(everyone who Knows Better will know I'm talking about most users, IT shops, etc - not the technical "merits")
Microsoft is finally getting bit by cultivating and preying on the culture of Good Enough. XP supports current hardware, runs current apps, ISVs are still writing for it. Users are comfortable with it, it handles games well (hey, check out the number of Big Name Games that require DX10), and while it's a security nightmare, most competent shops know enough to be able to keep their machines STD-free.
Vista is a host of new problems, support issues, and sucks on the same hardware XP zips on. Windows 7 isn't officially out yet... and when it is, most IT shops are going to wait. They'll poke it with a stick, sniff it like a dog, and rather it's a genuine improvement or not, they're not going to hop on it until they have to.
XP is the new BSD. It'll be "dying" for the next five to ten years. It's going to take a massive paradigm shift* in computing to get rid of it.
* I don't mean quad cores or eight-way cores or 64 gigs of ram for a nickel. I mean something equivalent to a massive rendering farm running an OS with a pile of APIs that'll securely handle every windows (and mac, while we're fantasizing) application ever written, with a battery life measured in decades. Said hardware would be the size of an iPhone, even easier to use, and you'd be able to buy them in vending machines at bus stations for $1.25. I mean that kind of paradigm shift.
... a massive "Thank-you, you dumb bastards."
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'd be happy if people stop using IE6 or even IE7, I'd prefer if they switch to something better then IE in the process, but I guess that's asking for to much.
New things are always on the horizon
Naturally businesses do not want to migrate to a more expensive OS. XP works.
They all said that about Windows 2000 as well. Most of them ended up switching to XP anyway. This isn't so much about what the customer wants or needs as what Microsoft needs. What they need is to refill their coffers by fleecing their captive market with a new OS... yet again.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs.
That's not necessarily mutually exclusive. There have always been a substantial number of businesses which don't see a compelling reason to upgrade when a new version of Windows comes out. 85% of those machines are used primarily for word processing, after all, something which has been "good enough" for a couple of decades. I worked for a company which was still happily using Windows for Workgroups in 2001. Add the people who always wait for Service Pack 2 and you're at a pretty big percentage of the market.
According to unofficial sources, the planned "End of Life" for Windows XP will be in December 21 of 2012.
With Linux, I know I can still go download updates for some ridiculously old distribution like Fedora Core 3 and that it will still work. It will never be sunset and I'll always be able to download it. Killing off an operating system when it's no longer profitable to keep it alive, despite the concerns of customers, is a reason why community-developed open source software is better.
Most, not all. Some still use 2000. And many large business only switched to XP within the past couple of years. This is no surprise. No pre SP1 version of Windows can be trusted in mission critical environments. It's unlikely that any large firm will fully switch to Windows 7 in the first 5 years of its lifetime.
There remains no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7. XP will be around for a good few years yet.
A couple of months ago, my brother has his XP installation is such a bad shape that I had to come over to fix it. While we were walking on the street we started discussing about XP vs. Vista and how much Vista sucks.
After a few minutes a random stranger on the street barges in on the discussion how much Vista really sucked. Yes people, a total stranger chipped in on a discussion to say his opinion on Vista. It simply sucks that much.
Windows 7 will probably be a lot better since it is pretty much impossible to do worse. Vista simply feels like a big step back. It's hard to really describe the flaws of Vista but using it simply feels so annoying.
Personally, I am wondering. What the hell is wrong with Vista? I know it sucks since I suffer using it but it simply feels so hard to describe. What made Vista suck?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"OSX is $129"
You realize how ridiculous this is when part of the cost of running OSX is the hundreds or thousands of dollars extra an Apple computer costs?
Le français vous intéresse?
I've used Vista for a short while and also some users (bought new PCs preloaded).
I, as the support person, hated it because it took me longer to find my way around it. It is not intuitive for people used to where MS used to place things. I'd say it was similar to going from OS9 to OSX in Mac userland. After a handful to users buying into Vista and then coming to lots of problems in terms of figuring out how to use it, I started recommending downgrades for their and mine sanity's sake.
Then I landed a corporate job, and our policy (I set my own, with advice from HQ in the UK) is to stick with XP. My primary reason is that my users are mostly set in their ways, and Vista from UI perspective will be a disaster. The other reason in that some legacy apps will probably cause problems to run. They even cause problems in XP.
So, when I order a PC from Dell, I always specify XP as the OS. It comes pre-installed.
On a side note, I also downgrade Office 2007 to 2003 Pro, again for usability reasons. I have Select Licenses, so I am "legally" entitled to.
Long live XP.
Why is it that M$ can simply put out an OS with a new face and a couple of new features and sell it as a new product, yet no one wonders about how they are being limited to their freedom of choice by their obvious attempt to control the market with crap and make you happy to pay for it. I think it's funny watching the monkeys pay for crap they already paid for and love paying way over it's value for it. M$ research is paid by the users who complain their asses off and still use their crap, they exploit the idiots who don't understand technology, and they progress through feeding off other company's devolpments and buying it through the above exploits. If you ask me, I'm happy MS sucks ass and idiots pay for their crap, it keeps proving that real programmers and technology enthusiests know more than multi billion dollar companies and their feeble attempts to pretend they know technology and how it works with people. Perhaps if M$ charged and made money other than from simply forcing us to use techology due to their foothold in the market and started putting out what worked and allowing individuals to improve on the techologies, we could truely say they are a proper and fair monopoly who is really looking out for the people and making things work.
Just put it out there, if your wrong... you learn, if your right, others learn.
people will still run Windows XP Pro in Virtual Machines just to run "legacy software" that does not run on Windows Vista, Windows 7.0, etc.
VirtualBox by Sun just reached version 3.0.0 and supports Windows XP, Vista, and 7.0 as both host and guest operating systems. It can even run DOS virtual machines, but has no addons support for DOS.
For DOS support most people just use DOSBox but it has no printing support. For example Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS runs in it, but since it has no printer support, just select Postscript for a printer and then use Ghostscript or some other Postscript program to drop the Postscript data file on to print it out. After Microsoft went to the Windows NT and up and left the Windows 9X platform, it broke a lot of DOS applications. DOSBox is cool, as it even supports Tandy 1000 standards so that means those DOS video games that selected CGA or Tandy graphics can be played in Tandy mode. That was before EGA and then later VGA was invented.
Retrocomputing is more than just a fad, for some that have "legacy software" issues they have to use older hardware and older operating systems, or run older operating systems in virtual machines and/or emulators.
The cost of upgrading "legacy software" to Windows Vista or even Windows 7.0 standards is too high and too difficult for most software companies, plus Windows Vista broke a lot of software development tools including some old versions of Visual Studio as recent as 2002 or 2003. There is a lot of software that businesses need, that cannot be converted to run on Vista or 7.0, which is why Microsoft has that XP Virtual Machine, but they futzed up the XP Virtual machine and it is not 100% XP compatible. So I am guessing virtual machines like VirtualBox, VMWare, etc will be used to run XP in a virtual machine for better compatibility.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Q to you all: Can I still activate new XP installation?
- I haven't even tried, been happy with them (servers) running Linux OS since day 1
I got few servers some years ago with XP Pro license sticker on them (that doesn't have any expiration date)
- NOTE: these licenses have never been activated.
So, when would be the last date (or was it already?) to activate already purchased and paid licenses?
- if it was already, can I ask for refund?
If you observe the stats collected in this page of the article, one will see that Lenovo and Dell machines constitute a very high percentage of downgrades. However, the other manufacturers are starkly lower in comparison.
I can't help but believe that this is because Dell and Lenovo are the main suppliers of business laptops in the United States. It's a well-known fact that businesses are super slow at transitioning to new versions of anything significant, especially operating systems. If one is going to make this sensational claim, people in the server community might as well bicker about how adoption to Server 2008 is as slow as molasses right now.
This will naturally slow once Windows 7 comes to the forefront, but considering how the release dates between the two are so close (Vista came out in 2007, 7 is coming out late this year or next year) and how vastly improved 7 is to Vista, there's no net benefit for businesses to adopt to Vista on user machines.
It's not like this is new information; it's always been like this. The big difference is that Microsoft is now suffering from taking so goddamn long to release a "meh" operating system and then release the awesome so soon afterwards.
Upgrade people ! XP is a great OS. Windows 7 64 bit supporting over 4gb of ram running on a brand new Solid State Disk (5x faster). It feels like the future is meant to feel !!!!!
I used to love XP.
Not anymore.
Once i installed Windows 7, i have no intention of going back to stupid XP.
Windows 7 for me is more stable, faster and less crashing.
Benefits:
1) Windows 7 installs faster and less intrusive than XP.
2) Windows 7 networking is far more advanced than the usual XP crap.
3) Display drivers crash do not cause a BSOD. Hell my nvidia beta driver crashed when i was running CoH:ToV. Windows 7 quietly told me the situation, restarted the driver and asked me if i wanted to roll back to previous version. I did.
4) Windows 7 is faster than XP in many ways. Multitasking, file operations, USB access, etc., all are much faster.
5) Device Manager shoots XP out of the water. I can pin point exact problems, roll back only those that are needed, and more.
For me, Windows 7 is a god-send. I haven't used Vista, but i love Windows 7 and would definitely pay good money for this.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
64 bit audio recording.
Wow, professional sound cards can do 64 bits now. Now that's a good dynamic range... My card only has 24 bits, but they are enough for me.
When people want XP you give it to them. People demand a product you produce the supply.
When the company that controls the main product is a monopoly the goal is to keep soaking you for everything.
You don't need Vista. You don't even need Win7. In fact, there is absolutely no need for either, nor is there a need for XP. 90% of the people do 99% of the same things. Those things can be performed by Linux.
Stop dictating that the people using computers have to upgrade to a specific product. Let them use what they want.
This is so stupid that it even happens. It is just so incredibly insane. We've gotta end this somehow. End the monopoly and people will have free choice again. There's no benefit to Microsoft's monopoly. It isn't benefiting society in any way.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.