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."

Comments

Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Dystopian Rebel]

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)

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Viol8]

"No it isn't. If you upgrade XP it runs slow. Slow Hardware runs slow."

Clearly you've never "upgraded" from XP to Vista where hardware slow under XP switches to glacial mode. Also there is some older hardware that XP supports which Win7 does not.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[gfxguy]

a) it is fast even on old hardware, No it isn't. If you upgrade XP it runs slow. Slow Hardware runs slow.

It has lower requirements than 7 or 8, so leaves more CPU cycles free for the user... You know what he meant.

b) it is supported by at least one good, secure Web browser (hint: not MSIE), For business? Businesses use IE, and the smart people break the policy and install other Browsers.

I work in a programming department for a large company... when people have problems with IE, we ask them to use a different browser - we don't officially support IE in any way. Our supervisors and managers already realized how much time and money we wasted trying to.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[gnick]

Businesses use IE, and the smart people break the policy and install other Browsers.

Depends on the business. At my company we have IE, but are encouraged to use FireFox instead (no other browsers allowed). At Los Alamos National Lab both IE and FireFox are installed on the computers, but only FireFox is allowed to access anything but internal sites.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Sheik Yerbouti]

No good business reasons to upgrade except for Microsoft's bottom line. Upgrades are good for Microsoft but not necessarily Windows users. It's time to start thinking about upgrades differently the desktop computer operating system technology is pretty mature at this point. The reasons for upgrading are often not really there anymore. Lucky for Microsoft they have drones like you who will advocate people upgrade for no good reason.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[PlusFiveTroll]

I'm testing Windows 8 on a 2008 core2duo and it runs fine, it normally runs 7. I do have it on a more modern hard drive. The problem for Microsoft is computers got 'fast enough' for average users at lest 4 years back if not longer. If 2008 hardware is acting touch and go on XP it's either bad hardware or a beyond average use case. Even XP itself got fat over the years. After the service packs and browser updates, XP wanted a whole lot more RAM to get the job done. As for Win8, I hate it's interface, but the resource requirements seem the same as 7.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[blind biker]

d) upgrading == (pain + time) && (upgrading != c)

Lazy ass IT.

Sometimes, the best thing IT can do is stay the fuck out of the way. Sometimes it's not laziness but on purpose, a decision to not disrupt productivity.

But what would you know about it. You felt the need to hammer a nail in each and every statement of GP. That screams shill or clueless.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[cluedweasel]

I agree, I have quite a few robotic machines running xp,

So do I, but that's enough about HR...

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[JMJimmy]

My father managed a moderate sized law office. Part of the issue in upgrading was support from 3rd party software which was integral to their business. The main issue was soft costs. As an example, they upgraded from Office 2003 to 2007, the cost of the software was ~$10,000. Not a big deal at all. However, each employee had to be trained on the new software, new procedures drawn up & training for those, then the productivity loss was huge. Overtime costs went up, additional staff needed to be brought on to keep things up to speed during the adjustment period. 3 months in the actual cost of the upgrade was over $100,000 and they were still not back to the level of productivity they were at before. End result: they downgraded back to 2003 and repeated the process once 2010 came around. 2010 stuck but $100,000+ down the drain is not an easy cost to absorb - even if it did work out.

In the end it's probably cheaper to keep XP, toss on Deep Freeze and just keep a document server up to date until you have no choice but to upgrade.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[gosand]

Or sometimes it is the SMART thing to do if IT doesn't want to create extra work for themselves. I work for a very large company, and I still use XP. There is a program in place to migrate to Win7, but it's been going on for over a year now. It takes time. And when I say large, I mean LARGE... think 250k+ employees around the world. If you want to migrate that many people away from WinXP to Win7, and still have internal support, you'd better have a good plan and it will take lots of time.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

This is why "Windows 7 is the new XP" because frankly the PCs released directly before and after Win 7 are such monsters that the average user won't need to replace until the hardware actually fails. lets look at what I was selling on the low end of my new builds 5 years ago...Phenom I X3s and X4s with 3-4gb of RAM and 300Gb+ HDDs. Now is there anything that your average user does that is gonna stress that system? remember these were my "$450-$500 specials" so weren't anywhere near even high end for the time, in fact the only reason i used quads more than X2s was the TLB bug and core 2 issue meant I could get those chips extra cheap. Hell I have a customer running the latest Solidworks on an X3 and is quite happy with the system.

So when you add to this a dead economy and Windows 8 being a tweeting twitting FB shitting frankenstein monster mash up of Windows and WinPhone its a recipe for failure. People simply don't need new systems, even the Core Duo first gen and Turion X2 laptops i sold are running just fine, that is why I've been branching off into HTPCs and home theater setups, because nobody needs a new desktop when they have a multicore with tons of RAM they aren't even stressing.

$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[vossman77]

We have a few expensive microscopes with WinXP on the corresponding machine, an expired service contract and in reality cannot upgrade without buying a new microscope (an newer drivers), so what do you do, other than put it behind a firewall and hope for the best.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Eldragon]

A local library has the same problem. Checkout hardware has drives for XP and Win2k. The service contract to upgrade these machines is far beyond the available tech budget. So this particular library will be running off XP until the hardware dies and replacements can no longer be found; my guess would be another 10 years.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[interkin3tic]

Get a new microscope from some company that doesn't force you to use an extremely shitty propietary file format and an extremely shitty program for operating you expensive confocal or other microscope. Instead, buy a microscope that uses open source software.

Oh, wait, such a company doesn't seem to exist. From my experiences with Olympus, they seem to constantly update their software specifically to break features and prevent you from using 3rd party analysis tools like Imaris, let alone FOSS software. One would think that since you bought a fancy new spinning disc from them, they'd let you run the analysis software, which is generally not worth paying for on it's own, on your computer. But no, they also like to make you use dongles on any other computer too. It's fucking ridiculous.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[hairyfeet]

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.

Won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Won't happen

[PlusFiveTroll]

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.

Re:Won't happen

[guruevi]

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

Re:Won't happen

[RabidReindeer]

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.

Re:Won't happen

[gfxguy]

In a completely unrelated industry... television production, we have a render box that was written on 32bit Red Hat about 6 six years ago. The company that sold us the system created proprietary modules. Now it's 2012, and our on air render box is an old version of Linux that cannot support more than 3GB RAM. We can't upgrade, because it would break the proprietary modules.

So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no." They never listen to me, though.

At my institute, it's still "popular"

[blind biker]

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.

Figures...

[RLU486983]

Micro$oft has an operating system that is running fairly stable and well and they want to axe it... puzzling!!

Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source Windows XP, then nobody will use it. Its base will become a muddled mess of forks until it eventually fades into nothing.

We were thinking XP looks pretty good

[Anonymous Coward]

So good in fact, we might just upgrade some of our Win98 machines to XP.

Nicely done, PR.

[HiGuys]

"...most new hardware options will likely not support the Windows XP operating system"

Alternately, Windows XP will not support new hardware, but that doesn't shift the blame now, does it?

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[Drummergeek0]

How is this insightful?

It is on the burden of the hardware manufacturers to write drivers, not the OS developer. Especially for new hardware. How in any way does the blame fall on XP and Microsoft?

Send us money!

[Bill_the_Engineer]

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

Re:Farewell XP

[JonJ]

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.

Re:Farewell XP

[jellomizer]

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.
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. .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.

Why?

[MyLongNickName]

My company has roughly 200 employees. From my perspective, I will plan to migrate off of our remaining XP machines (about 30) only because of security updates. In early 2014, I understand that security updates will cease, though I expect it will be extended. Were is not for this deadline by Microsoft, I wouldn't force the upgrade. In a corporate environment, the OS isn't terribly relevant, but the applications are. You'd be surprised how many application are still not ready for a native 64 bit environment, some niche programs that we rely on just won't work unless a 32 bit OS is emulated.

So, if Microsoft continued XP support indefinitely, I would never move. XP SP2 is the first OS Microsoft has offered that is solid and stable (just don't let users run as admin).

Opportunity for Linux

[gmuslera]

Even Microsoft is telling people to abandon the XP boat, Windows 8 seems to be Vista 2.0, and Windows 7 is looking like being a dead end (if you invest on it, will end pretty much like XP). If people must change and think that is not wise to go to Windows 7, well they could go to Linux, that share some of the possible objections of switching to windows 8 (training, not running some of their old apps) but having a lot of advantages (freedom, they could use their own hardware, the user interface could be more similar to WinXP than Win 8 is, safer, etc). And now native apps are less a concern, as most of usual apps work in the web.

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[Tridus]

When the equipment is providing frequent readings or results, it becomes a really expensive boat anchor if it's disconnected and those readings can't get to the people who need them.

Few businesses today want to pay someone to use sneakernet every 15 minutes to transfer new results to the network.

Re:Farewell XP

[interkin3tic]

Let's also celebrate slashdot accounts that have only one post, praising MS, put up the instant the story is posted. Because that's some effective trolling, for what that's worth. Been going on for a while and people are still taking it seriously.

Why I still have Windows XP licenses.

[Antony T Curtis]

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.

...and?

[Sycraft-fu]

It is the same deal with any OS. Ubutnu supports a LTS release for 5 years from the date it comes out, not the date you install it, not the date you get a system with it.

MS makes no secret of their support cycle. They promise 10 years of support from the date of release. Sometimes they extend it, as they did with XP, and they then make the new date known. So when you bought a system in 2010 with XP, you bought it knowing that there was only 3 years left on support for that OS.

Support lifecycles really aren't a hard concept, and MS is actually really good with them. Whining about it is rather silly.

Paddling furiously to get there....

[ElVee]

I'd be happy to get right on migrating chop chop just like MS wants. Our MS TAM keeps pushing pushing pushing, but the problem is that I have 30k+ workstations to manage. Just the act of physically upgrading the OS on each of those workstations takes plenty of time as it is. Plus, there's the matter of keeping the business going while I upgrade all those workstations.

First, however, I have to create a Win7 OS build that works on all the one-off situations I have. That a work in progress. Then I have to test the OS build on all those one-off situations. Then I have to test the bajillion apps I have and figure out what works and what doesn't. Then I have to determine what can be remediated and what has to be replaced. Then I have to get the budget for both remediation and replacement of those apps. Then I have to test, certify and package what's been remediated and replaced. Then I have to determine what will need to be certified by the various government agencies that we operate under. (We have to get governmental blessings in some cases to change hardware and/or software). Then I have to buy replacement hardware for those workstations that are below the waterline for the new OS. Then I have to schedule (and pay for) end user training on the new OS in various languages in cities all over the globe. Then I have to plan the overwhelming logistics of putting a new OS on all these workstations all over the globe in a manner that doesn't disrupt the business. In addition, I have to deliver replacement hardware to the right place at the right time with very limited resources (that is, not enough people to install so many boxen). Then I have to have the support infrastructure in place to support the inevitable issues that will come roaring in. Then I have to have procedures in place to investigate these issues on the new OS and do whatever is required to unbreak whatever is broken, whether it be sending the software back for fixes or unforeseen hardware replacements.

So, yeah, pardon me if I'm running a bit behind. I've got a lot of work to do with too few staff, too little time and not enough money. But, what else is new?

No sympathy

[Mr_Silver]

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.

Re:Great advertisement

[cbhacking]

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

Office 2003 can read .docx just fine

[Chemisor]

You might not be aware of this, but Microsoft provides a compatibility pack for Office 2003 that allows reading and writing .docx and other 2007+ formats. With the pack, we can all keep the last good MS Office interface for as long as we like. Death to the ribbon!