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Microsoft Urges Businesses To Get Off XP
An anonymous reader writes "It's approximately 11 years since Windows XP was unveiled, and this week Microsoft was still at it trying to convince users that it's time to upgrade. A post on the Windows For Your Business Blog calls on businesses to start XP migrations now. Microsoft cites the main reason as being that support for XP ends in April 2014, and 'most new hardware options will likely not support the Windows XP operating system.' If you run Windows Vista, Microsoft argues that it's time to 'start planning' the move to Windows 8. As this article points out, it's not uncommon to hear about people still running XP at work."
XP is still common at work because
a) it is fast even on old hardware,
b) it is supported by at least one good, secure Web browser (hint: not MSIE),
c) it supports about 15 years worth of professional applications (some of which are not available anymore), and
d) upgrading == (pain + time) && (upgrading != c)
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
All our research and analysis software works fine with XP, all the office, design (CAE/CAD etc.), editors, image manipulation, diagram plotting etc. etc. etc. works fine. No fucking need to upgrade means no upgrade happens. I know, this is shocking to many people on the MS Windows upgrade treadmill, but sometimes, you know, common sense prevails.
I know, I know, awfully shocking.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Micro$oft has an operating system that is running fairly stable and well and they want to axe it... puzzling!!
Alternately, Windows XP will not support new hardware, but that doesn't shift the blame now, does it?
Dear satisfied XP user,
We can't make any money if you insist on using Windows XP. Please upgrade to our new Windows 8. Since software developers also need money, you may notice that you'll have to replace the software that will not work in Windows 8.
While we're at it, the hardware vendors would love some of your money. Your old computer probably won't run Windows 8 anyway. So support our hardware partners. You can save yourself some time by just go ahead and buy the new Computer and it will come with a crippled version of Windows 8 that we'll be glad to upgrade for you at a reasonable cost.
We're happy that your computing needs are being satisfied with what you have, but we would be even happier if you send us money for our new OS.
Thanks for spending!
Microsoft
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
On that note, I think it would be good to say goodbyes to Windows Vista too. Windows 7 and 8 are truly better and the only OS we currently need, on top of Mac OS X. That trio is something beautiful and hard for anyone to break.
Yes, let's all celebrate a duopoly of walled gardens. That'll be grand.
-- Linux user #369862
Slashdot: Back in 2001. XP is horrible it looks like it was made by phisher price....
Back in 2002-2004 we giggled in glee as malware like Code Red started to severely infect Windows XP
XP is still bad.
But Vista was a flop, it took way too long and offered too many issues. So we got use to it. Granted XP was better then ME or 98, but that was due to Microsoft Finally pushing the NT Kernel on consumer OS's.
XP long run was due to Microsoft Failing last decade. .NET made development too hard. (I actually like programming in .NET myself) but Microsoft sacrificed VB for it. Because VB was meant to be an easy to program language that any poor slob can code. .NET turned vb from a GUI scripting language to an OO language. Giving a huge learning curve to the Non-Developers programmers (Businessmen, Engineers, ... who wrote a program to fit their need) Yes it created higher quality code and saved us IT professionals form VB hell but if you needed to hire a real developer to make your software. That developer just may choose some more platform independent languages to do the work, even if they did use .NET they would have made more Web Based applications just so they can debug problems better, and have better contol of the software. Good for us, bad for MS.
Trying to Make Vista (Longhorn) a super mega OS, where they just couldn't do it, taking time away from smaller improvements.
Fighting with Apple iPod Halo, where people started to take Mac's seriously again. And Apple was quick to release new versions of it's OS.
Bad press from the FTC ruling. Yes they didn't get punished by the feds as much, but in terms of user perception it was got bad. People didn't use Microsoft Products because they wanted to but because they felt like they had to.
Firefox - Safari - Chrome: These web browsers kicked the butt on IE 6 and Developers took notice and started making their pages more Other browser friendly. Plus these other Browsers work just as well on other OS's.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I have largely left Windows behind but I find that when relatives hand me their Windows box to fix that Windows XP is easier to set right. Just all those little things like the serial number having a much higher chance of working. I find (especially with Windows 7) that I put the correct version DVD in and it rejects the MS serial number that is glued to the box. Then it goes downhill from there.
Then if I have to install any corporate crap like Citrix that it has an inversely proportional ratio of functioning properly to version beyond XP.
Lastly I test my own stuff on Windows by either compiling the program occasionally on windows or running my web apps on IE in a VM. Again the XP VM tends to be speedy and small. Windows 7 tends to be cranky in a VM so even though I am just running it for a few minutes I find it less pleasant. This is not some kind of show stopper just an observation that Windows XP is not glaringly worse than Windows 7 for basic usage.
So I would not ever recommend that someone pull Windows 7 off their machine but that some corporate type with an Office full of XP machines running just fine doubtfully will reap much reward through a huge upgrade. Personally if I were in charge of an office full of XP machines I would organically just replace dead machines with a new machine running whatever newer OS came with it. Someone might complain that supporting multiple OS versions is a cost in and of itself but if supporting multiple OS versions is a cost then your IT structure is either really really big or your IT people really suck.
I went to a brand new dentist office the other day. They were running XP on their brand new xray machines.
If Microsoft were smart, they would release an XP R2, they could call it "Windows for Business" and sell if for $150 a license.
If they were feeling generous they could remove the licensed RAM limits, give it a GPT boot option (heck they don't even have to do any work, just package it with some of the 3rd party options).
A problem with closed source systems is that if the company decides that it's not in its business interest to support some old but popular software, NO ONE ELSE can offer such support. Even if there's a demand for the continued support and other people willing to offer it, the business opportunity is not there since Microsoft controls the market. The more Microsoft pushes people off some platform, the harder everyone should consider some alternative solutions.
Besides, what support are we talking about here? If 11 years after Windows XP was released is not enough to fix the glitches that were made during the development, how long enough is enough? Twenty year to fix the bugs?
There's no such thing as "illegal download"
The lawsuits and associated costs are minimal compared to some overhauls.
Lawsuit settled with a couple of identity protection services: $2M
Overhauling all software to run on the latest platforms and implement e-records: $50M
Having no tech specs nor existing companies to support the software you just implemented and have history repeat itself every decade: Priceless
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well, yes, but Chevy's not currently making engines for it or offering warranty support. Are you saying I should be able to take my 56 year old automobile back to the manufacturer and have them replace the carb with a fuel injection system?
Let XP die already. It's "unsafe at any speed", to piggy-back on your metaphor.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
For all the specialists saying a variety of "no way, my expensive hardware is too expensive to replace for this reason," you aren't the target demographic of the original blog post. The target demographic are the companies that are not upgrading the computers at employee desks. I highly doubt your microscope controller software is on a system that is also used by salesmen to browse the internet. I would be surprised if your extremely expensive specialty hardware is even on a network that can be accessed directly by a marketting depatment of any kind.
I work in a hospital setting where most, if not all, computers run XP. In radiology specifically, the PACS software we run is only certified for windows XP and ie 6.
Hospital doesn't want to invest money into upgrading pacs software.
I do quite a bit of work in veterinary medicine and the costs associated with upgrading is pretty large. The scary part of a lot of this software isn't that it's certified to work on XP, it's that its so crappily written that it only works on XP with admin access and any number of bandaids to make it work. What I've done in a few cases is virtualized the XP box where it was possible. Trying to keep this stuff running over the long term is going to be fun.
The Wal-Mart Shopper mentality.
1. Thinking that the cost of something is the cost at the cash register. Despite what everyone thinks, computers are not a fixed cost, there is ongoing expense. Sooner or later, all software becomes obsolete. Not because there's something wrong with the software, but because the world in which the software lives changes. Sooner or later, you not only cannot run the old software on the new OS, you often cannot get replacement hardware that can run it when the original equipment dies. If you don't budget for upgrades, you'd better either plan to be gone by then or be fortunate enough to be able to toss the whole thing. Emulators only go so far - Windows 98 is dead and getting no new security updates but that doesn't mean hackers don't still consider exploits.
2. Expecting that "IT doesn't matter" and that whoever delivers fastest and/or cheapest is "good enough". So much software out there is crap, just because people won't accept that quality takes time, effort, and money.
Can your apps run in Wine under Linux? This might be a very feasable "workaround". I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
XP Pro has more functionality than Windows 7. To get equivalent function for which I currently use, I would have to purchase Windows 7 Ultimate. The price tag for it is more than the cost of the machines that it would be running on.
It is simply too expensive for little-to-no gain in functionality.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Any real enterprise customer's don't need activation.
Well one answer to that is "that'll learn you to buy Windows for system critical hardware". If you had bought Linux, and Linux-compatible microscopes (and damnit, scientific equipment is one of the few areas which does have decent Linux driver support), you would not be having this problem.
I hope you remember this experience when you do come to upgrade. If you upgrade to Windows 7, you'll have the exact same problem in 5-15 years time.
I'm amazed the number of people complaining.
Whenever I hear people moan about how they're running XP and it has been working just fine for the last ten years, I immediately think to myself that they've been lucky that they haven't needed to do part of their job for so long.
The folks running and maintaining servers or software products do an upgrade once every couple of months and you cannot do one upgrade in ten years?
Upgrading any hardware and software (not just Windows) is part of the cost of doing business, if you haven't factored it in (and after 10 years, calling the "upgrade treadmill" is a tad overly dramatic), then what forward planning have you been doing?
And if you really cannot upgrade, then maybe you should consider looking at implementing backup plans now? Because at some point, whatever you are relying on will stop working and you'll have to do something. It's not like you don't have any prior warning.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
In what sense isn't Mac App Store a walled garden? It's moderated, and they force a sandbox on apps now.
In the sense that the walled garden has a gate (keeper) that allows you to download any app from any other source and still run that. You can't do that on the interface formerly known as metro, though you can still run classic windows apps sourced from anywhere on the Windows 8 desktop (but not on the Windows RT classic desktop).
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
XP is practically 32-bit only (its 64-bit port has almost no driver support). This means less than 4GB of addressable RAM, once drivers are mapped in. By 2014 we'll have smartphones with that much... Also, more RAM means more programs resident in RAM at once, which means instant task switching, which improves productivity because people don't get distracted waiting for the OS to thrash the requested data out of the pagefile (swap). Also, XP's memory management algorithms are archaic - they're from an era when 256MB was a lot of RAM for a PC, not a really crappy smartphone - and will very aggressively move data out of RAM to the pagefile. This means that XP makes much poorer use of additional RAM than it should, again leading to reduced productivity.
XP doesn't support ASLR. DEP alone is trivial to bypass (there are entire compiler toolchains that build ROP payloads these days) and this means that nearly any memory corruption bug is trivial to turn into a working exploit on XP. It's much, much harder on newer versions. Additionally, there are a lot of bugs in older Windows versions that are either fixed during development of newer versions, or the relevant feature was re-written without the bug (and received a hell of a lot more security testing). There's a reason that practically every Windows 0-day exploit works on XP, but very few of them work on Win7 (even if Win7 theoretically also contains the vulnerability, the mitigations in place make successful exploitation much, much harder).
XP's support for SSDs is practically nonexistent (it treats them like any other block device, leading to terrible decreases on performance over time). You claim XP is productive, but the productivity boost that comes from the OS being able to load programs and files near-instantly is also significant, and SSDs are a huge help there. Newer versions of Windows can also use removable Flash storage as a solid-state cache, which again dramatically improves access time for frequently used data or programs. XP feels *laggy* on fairly modern hardware, compared newer Windows versions. Yes, there is a tipping point where XP will run better just due to its lower minimum specs, but that tipping point is a long, long way below even low-end modern PCs (my parents' netbook from three years ago runs smoother on Win7 than it did with the XP that it shipped with).
XP's built-in search is a complete joke. Index-based "instant" search is a tremendous improvement in the latency of "dealing with the OS" (finding files / emails, launching programs, managing data, etc.) and that, again, translates to improved productivity due to higher efficiency in how people use their time. Yes, it requires a little adjusting to "the new way" of doing things, but spend a couple days actually using it and trying to use XP instead will feel like using a slide rule instead of a graphing calculator.
Believe it or not, all those UI changes on the desktop are a lot more than just eye candy. Aero Snap (snap windows to fill exactly half the screen with a quick click+drag or a key chord) makes multitasking or comparing / combining data tremendously faster. That's a very significant productivity boost for many types of work - it's pretty close to turning each monitor into two, and I expect most /. users are famailiar with the benefits of multi-monitor setups - and it very quickly becomes reflex to the point that, again, trying to use XP is purely an exercise in frustration. You may claim that XP "makes sense" but if you haven't actually used a more productive UI, you won't know what you're missing!
As for your "personally" bit, that's absurd. Binaries built on Win7 work on whatever platform you target them for, most certainly including XP (you can be damn sure MS doesn't run its build machines on XP...) and of all the supposedly technical reasons I've heard for not switching, that's most likely the most boneheaded. If that is representative of your understanding of software development, I hope to hell I never have to use any software you
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You see? THIS, this right here, is why Ballmer should have been fired a half a fricking decade ago. if his fat ass would have gotten Longhorn out on schedule (Nooo...Vista is NOT Longhorn, Ballmer had them throw Longhorn out and and start over because it was more like XP X64 and not as bling heavy as Ballmer wanted, had to compete with Apple on the shiny ya know) then so many wouldn't be trapped on XP now, but it took so damned long to get Vista out the door, and it was half assed and reeked of fail anyway, that XP hung onto to the point many simply can't afford to trash it because too damned many other systems depend on it.
What MSFT should have done is bust ass on XP Mode in Win 7 with a mantra of "if it runs on XP, it works in XP Mode" and made damned sure all those businesses could just switch without downtime, maybe even supported cloning existing XP installs for XP Mode VMs, but Ballmer is too damned busy drooling on an iPad to see he is royally fucking up and losing the business market, the bread and butter of MSFT. Stupid, that's what it is, fucking stupid.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm sorry but Linux is for programmers and BY programmers and the odds of it having drivers for such a funky specialized piece of equipment, one where the company that made it probably never gave a shit about Linux and may have even gone OOB years ago? Virtually nil.
The people like you that look at Linux as a panacea don't get into the nitty gritty logistics we are talking here because if you did you wouldn't even suggest it. What they would have to do if they followed your advice would be to reverse engineer the drivers for the hardware (no small task and NOT cheap), build their own software to run the scans, again no small task, and then have everything certified for HIPPA compliance where sure as fuck is NO small task and expensive as hell.
So I'm sorry but Linux would be a BAD IDEA with a capital B. The best plan would be to isolate the system on a VLAN and let their users access that way, this would allow them to keep XP without worrying about lack of support after 2014. Since XP lasted so long you can still find many newer systems with XP drivers so they will be able to get plenty of replacement systems for probably a good decade. A LOT cheaper than following your advice.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.