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Slashdot Asks: Will You Need the Windows XP Black Market?
NicknamesAreStupid (1040118) writes "As Whoever57 pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP — the 'haves'. However, most will be the 'have nots.' Anytime you have such market imbalance, there is opportunity. Since Microsoft clearly intends to create a disparity, there will certainly be those who defy it. What will Microsoft do to prevent bootleg patches of XP from being sold to the unwashed masses? How will they stop China from supporting 100 million bootleg XP users? And how easily will it be to crack Microsoft's controls? How big will the Windows XP patch market be?"
There are a lot of businesses still on Windows XP; if you work for one of them, will the official end of life spur actually cause you to upgrade? (And if so, to what?)
Seriously? Nobody even bothered to read the first sentence of the submission?
It costs a lot more than a new PC to upgrade thousands of PCs. Imaging, deployment, backup/restore processes for the end users is just the beginning. Upgrading dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individual customized applications to be compatible with Windows 7 is an absolute nightmare. I know all about this just from upgrading my relatively small workplace from XP to 7. It was a fight just to get core, mission critical apps to work with IE 9; 10 and 11 are out of the question. Lots of cash to vendors and app support folks, lots of cash to deployment specialists, lots of overtime. Adds up to a LOT of money.
By the way: $9 million over 680,000 PCs is $13 per PC. That's less than we paid per PC to have a contractor come in and physically install new machines at desks, and completely ignores the cost of OS licensing, hardware, support, and the thousands and thousands of man hours the IT department spent with associated tasks.
Nobody in their right mind is going to resort to the black market for XP support for a business -- it'd be like *inviting* the crackers into your network.
Home users either won't know how or won't care to bother. Most people I know who are still running XP have been virus-infected for months or even years. As long as it lets them play YouTubes, check their gMail, and surf Crackbook they just flat out don't *care* that the machine is infected.
Hell, most of them don't even realize the adware popups they keep seeing are due to an *infection*, not "bad behaviour" on the part of the aforementioned websites. One fellow I knew used to complain about the "popups from YouTube" all the time, 'cause all he ever did was YouTube and Crackbook. As far as he was concerned, it was YouTube that was putting up all the porn ads.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The objective of applying security updates from Microsoft is to make your OS safer by applying fixes delivered by a trusted party. MS may not be perfectly "trusted" but at least it has to worry about the liability of any fishy piece of software they install in your computer. On the other hand any source from the "black market" can simply deliver rootkits and any kind of malware disguised as security updates which certainly defies the purpose of applying updates.