Maybe With Help From Google and Adobe, Microsoft Can Kill Windows XP

colinneagle sends this excerpt from Network World: "Google announced last Friday that, in accordance to its policy of supporting a current browser and the immediate predecessor, its Google Apps productivity suite would drop support for Internet Explorer 8 once Windows 8 ships. Neither IE9 nor IE10 are available on XP. Adobe announced on the Photoshop Blog that the next version of Photoshop CS would support only Windows 7 and 8. The current version, CS6, is available for XP but, amusingly, not for Vista, which was its successor. This is a much-needed boost for Microsoft, which anxiously wants to put XP out to pasture after 11 years. Despite efforts to get rid of the old OS, XP still holds 43% of the market, according to the latest monthly data from Net Applications. Among Steam customers, Windows 7 has 70% market share, covering both 32-bit and 64-bit, while XP has 12%. That confirms what has been known for some time: consumers are adopting Windows 7 at a much faster rate than businesses. I know there is a whole economic argument to be had, and these numbers are not precise or scientific, but if XP really can be found in only 12% of households but 43% of businesses (or something close to that), then it really is time for the enterprise to stop dragging its tail."

Comments

Kill XP?

[jawtheshark]

You'd think so.... However, you'd be mistaken. The main reason for this is that XP is used by two types of "customers":

• Business users, that are locked to a certain platform that only support IE6. I know, the vendor of that platform should adapt its code. Business software release cycles are glacial. It will eventually happen, but slowly. Also, replacing computers costs money. Many businesses won't spend money on (perceived) non-core business.
• "Good enough" users. The power of modern computers, even lower end ones, is more than most users can throw at. Let's be honest: is a P-IV 2.0GHz with 1GB or 2GB RAM not enough to run Windows XP and the few applications most normal users run? Yep, I thought so. Unlike most slashdotters, normal people keep their computers for a long time and replacing them is a hassle for them. Given replacing a computer is not only a hassle, but also costs money... money that can be used for more fun things, they won't do it. Note also, that people in this category are also very likely to stick with the software they own. They won't stand in a line for the latest Photoshop and are most likely still happily using the Microsoft Word that came bundles with the pre-installed Works package.

Those people will not switch until they get new computers and that simply is the way it works and should work. Finally! Stupid upgrade treadmill.

From an administrator point of view, Windows XP is well known and mature. Which means, you can anticipate problems and make sure everything works like expected. With 7 (let's ignore Vista) a whole slew of new problems got exposed (not necessarily for the users, but for the admins... Try partitioning a 7 machine in two parts: one drive OS/Apps, on drive Data... Results must be seamless for newly created users. Another example is to copy a user profile as a default template. 7 is a true bitch for these things)

What 7 brings to the table, and the only reason I recommend it, is 64-bit. If you need more than 4GB RAM, get 7. I think Microsoft should do a "Windows Classic" which is XP re-branded, and sell it as a subscription to finance future patches. Let's say 5€/month. I think it would sell like hotcakes. I think I'd take it for the few remaining XP machines, I haven't converted to Linux yet. (I'll probably convert one back to XP as the ATI drivers for that laptop suck donkeys balls)

Re:Kill XP?

[ajo_arctus]

Business users, that are locked to a certain platform that only support IE6.

I hear this a lot, and in some (but very few) circumstances it's certainly true. However, mostly it's not. Most internal web apps run just fine on IE7, 8 and 9 too. My feeling is that these businesses don't want to upgrade because the current tool (usually a Dell Pentium 4 with XP) is working just fine. Why would any sane businesses want to spend money replacing something that works perfectly well? Well, you and I know a few good answers to that, but we're not the decision makers here.

BTW, I'm a developer, and I wrote a lot of those apps that originally ran on IE, so I've seen this all the way through. There aren't truly that many apps that are genuinely IE6 only. Most run just fine on newer versions of IE, and often times FF and Chrome too. As a developer, even though I was targeting IE only back in the early 2000s, I actually used Firebird (which then became Firefox) to do most of my testing -- and I don't think I was alone.

Re:Kill XP?

[hairyfeet]

There is a LOT more to recommend Win 7 than just X64, although that IS good. With Win 7 I have placed it on systems as "old school" as a socket 754 sempron with 2gb of RAM and the system...was actually snappy. Thanks to Win 7 having MUCH better memory management the system has real snap, more than XP, and by slapping a cheapo 2Gb flash drive i had around for Readyboost to take up the small I/Os it loads programs MUCH better.

That said you have a third set of users..those whose systems are frankly overpowered for them. You point out the "good enough" while forgetting that XP was sold until Win 7 was released in 09 so I've seen plenty of duals and even triples with 3Gb of RAM and WinXP. Lets look at the low end of those, the Pentium D 820. That chip was used a LOT in low end systems, heck you can find those chips for like $8 now, they are just so plentiful. Now what does the average user actually DO that would slam this chip? Facebook? watching YouTube? listening to MP3s and burning CDs?

Now I have gotten all my customers to switch to Win 7 by pointing out all the extra features and better performance, but I can understand why some wouldn't change until their systems die. After all its a major PITA to completely replace your OS, and frankly most users won't have the skill so its $100 for the OS and another $$ to pay someone to do it. And with the economy in the toilet why go through that work when you have nearly a year and a half of support left?

But I disagree about admins, Win 7 is frankly a joy to admin and is much less likely to go flaky than WinXP, which you have to remember has had 3 SPs and a ton of patches. Finally Win 7 is easy to use without admin rights, whereas XP is a royal PITA to get programs running without admin rights. You often have to tweak like crazy to get programs to play nice without admin, sure most admins are USED to it, but that doesn't mean its pleasant or fun.

Re:Kill XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought Win XP, why should I upgrade as long it runs all programs I want to run?

What is the reason for me to give Microsoft more money, when my copy of XP runs fine on my home computer?

I will never buy a upgraded windows version, unless I get one with new hardware or my XP gets to outdated that the programs I want to run simply does not support XP.

Please point out, what is so great with the newer versions of windows?

Re:Kill XP?

[hairyfish]

Why would any sane businesses want to spend money replacing something that works perfectly well? Well, you and I know a few good answers to that

Out of interest what are those answers? I've been through a few Win7 business cases and none of them got accepted. The current place is upgrading purely because we are being forced to my MS as support reaches EOL. Planned obsolescence. Right now we still use XP and it does everything we need it to. Sure 7 might do more, but we don't need more, we just need a stable platform to run our business apps. XP does this and now costs us nothing. The same can't be said for Win7 (or any other OS alternative).

Re:Kill XP?

[dargaud]

You are forgetting one 'use case' scenario: virtual machines. I've long converted to Linux all work and family computers, but there are a few tasks that can only be performed in Windows. A virtual machine works fine for that and I'm not going to waste time and money (and CPU cycles) on the latest version for that.

Re:Kill XP?

[jythie]

Actually, the 'free market' can fail rather badly. It is a nice toy system, but when implemented in the real world it dependency on pure forms can become a liability. Free Markets are like Anarchy... unstable and decay into other forms quickly.

Re:Kill XP?

[hairyfeet]

I had some customers like that, know what I did? I told them to buy just one new box and compare it to their P4 and if they were happier with the P4 I'd hand them their money back and sell the box.

I picked one of the secretaries that had this awful P4 that sounded like a jet taking off and just belched heat and replaced it with an AMD E350 mini, no heat and noise and of course as i pointed out her power usage dropped to less than 18w while having a faster system. She of course just raved about how much nicer it was and they were sold. So with the exception of a few of the graphics guys that needed more power most were changed out to low power units, E350s for the ones just doing basic office work and low power Phenoms for those that were doing a little more heavy lifting.

For those stuck with a boss that thinks "It ain't broke so don't fix it" let your old pal Hairyfeet tell you how to win them over...point out how much money they are tossing each month on power and AC. The Pentium 4 was probably THE worst chip ever made when it comes to power, since Intel with those long pipes on netburst just kept throwing more and more power trying to beat AMD in MHz, and of course they are nearly always paired with some big ass CRT which is also sucking juice and belching heat all over the place.

So just pick up a Kill-A-Watt and show them how much money they are flushing on electricity and then point out that they are blowing even more on top of that in waste heat that has to be dealt with. Then point out how the low power Intel and AMD chips paired with a power efficient LCDs mean they can run 3 systems for the same power 1 of those P4s is sucking and its really not hard to get them to see the big picture. Heck they can't even use IE6 as an excuse since you can run 6, 7, and 8 in XP Mode and even have it preset to ONLY go to the Intranet app, thus letting you use a safer more modern browser for everything else.

Money may be tight but with an office full of P4s and CRTs it really doesn't take long at all for energy efficient units to pay for themselves. As an added bonus Win 7 is supported until 2020 so you can point out they should be set for the rest of the decade.

Re:Kill XP?

[Tenebrousedge]

As a home user,

1. Security.
2. Security.
3. A saner driver model.
4. Support for newer hardware. Vanilla XP needs drivers slipstreamed into the installer to deal with SATA drives.
5. Support for more standards-compliant versions of IE. Only Microsoft thinks that tying improvements like that to major OS releases is a good idea.

More minor things include an updated sound system (per-app volume levels), better graphics composition, improved boot times (varies), more efficient use of hardware (e.g. SuperFetch/Readyboost), and probably half a dozen other things I've forgotten.

I don't like buying things from Microsoft either. I switched from XP to linux and haven't looked back. However, I don't ignore that they have made a number of improvements since the days of XP. People seem to really like Win7, for what it's worth. Personally, the only way that I would use XP at this point would be from read-only media; Windows before the introduction of UAC was basically without a security model.

Re:Kill XP?

[Aaden42]

The last time I had to activate Windows via phone, I entered the code, and it hung up on me. It did that repeatedly calling every few days over the course of a month. Finally said fsck it and installed Gentoo on the thing.

I won't pay for software I have to ask permission to use. I won't build my business on software that can arbitrarily stop working if some monkey pushes the wrong patch to the activation servers. If you're going to treat me like a pirate even if you have my money, then I'll just keep my money. Arrrr...

Re:Kill XP?

[MitchDev]

How about home users who can't spare $100 just fill M$'s coffers when what they already have works just fine?

Vista

[jrumney]

The difference between consumer and business is Vista. Businesses never went near it, and consumers can't wait to get rid of it.

Re:Vista

[temcat]

Well, I for one don't plan to get rid of Vista. Moreover, I'm going to buy a used box of Vista Ultimate which sells for ridiculously low price here (due to bad rep) and install it on a PC that is going to be upgraded. This is because Vista works perfectly fine nowadays (and is more stable than XP for me), so I cannot see any reasons to choose 7.

Let me get this straight

[PCK]

If you are a company that has a working system that runs fine, why would you force an upgrade just because XP is n't used by consumers any more? Even if you put the economic costs at zero which it certainly is n't and the summary brushes aside way to casually; you always have a risk factor of unforseen issues getting passed testing.

No business should upgrade for the sake of technology fashion, weather it be OS or applications. Hell you see companies running custom DOS programs all the time.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Richard_at_work]

How many companies use *just* custom DOS programs tho?

A company I worked for for many years used a green screen suite of apps which they had been developing since about 1985 - they started out with dumb terminals, and gradually moved on to Windows with a terminal emulator and then stayed with the terminal emulator while tracking Windows releases. If they had stayed on dumb terminals, their business would have suffered.

The problem here has nothing to do with DOS applications or custom green screen stuff - that can always be accommodated. The real issue is that your suppliers are moving on, and it becomes harder and harder to find new versions of applications which run on your platform - how many new apps are released today which run on Windows 98? Is Windows 98 still a viable OS to run? No.

Re:Let me get this straight

[somersault]

A lot of "business" computers only need email and an office suite. There was quite a big difference between Windows 98 and Windows 2000/XP. There's less difference between XP and Windows 7.w

How dare corps still use something that works?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay your Microsoft tax now! Balmer needs new chairs.

Risky

[pmontra]

If MS forces almost half of its customers (that's more or less what the 43% of the desktop/laptop market is) to upgrade they are going to lose some of them in the process. Some people will buy a Mac instead of a new PC, some will buy a tablet and forget about their old PC, some will install Linux. I can understand why Google is happy with that, even understand why Adobe doesn't care about XP (its customers have to keep working with its sw, no matter what) but MS is sending some of its customers to somebody else. Furthermore I believe that many companies are waiting to get a boost thanks to the WinXP end of life in 2014.

Why Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would business from XP to Windovs 7 (or Windows 8)? For that matter, why would non-gamer browsing and office only user do that? As long as they do not need some new Photoshop or other Windows 7 software, they have no need to update.

Businesses are not supposed to buy new stuff just because it is shiny, they are supposed to spend money only when it is effective. Home users can spend the same money on tons of other fun or useful things. Why new computer when the old one is just fine for what you do?

Re:Compare 2 extreme to make one of them look bad.

[mwvdlee]

Companies have a bunch of "good" reasons to keep XP.

Rather they have no good reasons NOT to stick with XP.
Except ofcourse artificial limits created by Microsoft.
If MS would keep supporting XP, it could easily go on for another ten years.

Carrot or stick...

[Zemran]

Maybe it is well past time that companies (i.e. Microsoft) learnt to support customers rather than drive them. If 43% of businesses are really happy with XP then they should continue to support it. Many companies are fed up with constant updates (although constant is not an apt word with this time frame) and would prefer to stick with something that works. Most companies are not interested in bleeding edge and just want Doris to be able to type up that invoice for the roof that Gary has fixed or the sink that Fred unblocked or whatever and updating the computer to do the same job is of zero importance.

It is one thing that a company does not want to continue to develop an old product but when they pull the plug on updates etc. rather than just leaving the server running, I feel that they are not complying with their agreement. If Doris needs to run a new scanner or something that does not work with XP then it is time for her to talk to her boss but while she is happy with her laserjet churning out reams of invoices and heating up the office at the same time, let her.

Written using XP :-)

Businesses are concerned with applications.

[couchslug]

When you have thousands of dollars in CAD software (for example) on a system which works fine for your needs, you lose time and money changing out your PC. If some of that software doesn't work well with later Windows versions, you lose even more.

The cost of the PC and OS may be trivial, but replacing it may "cost" much more than buying a new machine.

Re:The Cost

[cyber-vandal]

I love these kinds of articles, usually from someone who's never had a proper IT job, who assume that businesses are just being lazy or cheap just because they don't feel spending a fortune to replace something that still works fine with something that probably won't work any better and may actually be worse.

If it is not broke, don't fix it

[TheDarkMaster]

If it is not broke, do not fix it. If your system (which can be huge and cost millions) is working perfectly well on XP, why update?

Another difference between XP and Vista

[transporter_ii]

XP has a "corporate" install disk that didn't need product activation in both 32 and 64-bit, and passed genuine advantage. Vista and 7 do not. If Microsoft *really* wants Windows 8 to take off, don't be surprised if a Windows 8 corporate install version doesn't get released for *cough* corporations.

Really, because of the 'ol corporate install version of XP, it is going to running in virtual machines for an eternity.

Part of it is just a coincidence, but notice the decline of Microsoft right about the same time they came up with product activation that works fairly well and didn't release a corporate install disk. Apple, Linux, etc., all doing pretty good now.

Reap what you sew Microsoft

[erroneus]

Microsoft created a vendor lock-in strategy. Expensive and proprietary, they encouraged everyone to develop develop develop for it.

Microsoft has pushed the limits of what companies will spend for OSes and applications. That everything is so very integrated, while it encourages business to work within its proprietary framework, prevents them from easily leaving it.

The short description of the problem? It's deeply complex and rooted within business systems and Microsoft created things this way intentionally.

What did they expect would happen?