Microsoft: XP is supported through April 2014

I was wondering if Microsoft could help my son Waethorn. He needs some support for his extension.

If you are a business which foolishly wrote in-house web apps which depend on IE-6, yes you hope XP lives forever. (And that's a prime reason IE 6 still shows up in share numbers--never change what came out of the box is another.)

13 years? That's amazing, frankly. Barring some fundamental change in the way we interact with computers, could XP be good enough for most people for many years to come? Is the operating system's set of services, at this point, essentially complete? And might this be true of office applications as well?

"There's no reason to carry it even further. By the time Windows 7 comes out, the vast majority of nettops should be able to transition to Windows 7 without many issues." So you're saying that the netbook that you buy should automatically require an upgrade and be obsoleted just because there's a new, shiny OS available for it? Do you want to *force* them to upgrade? Talk about screwing your customers. Don't get me wrong...I agree with you in principle, but there's no need to force anyone buying a netbook with XP today to be told their OS won't be supported in the forseeable future. Thankfully, Microsoft is smarter than that.

@subzero stop looking at it from a geek standpoint. Put on your business cap brother. At a company its about Value > Cost. Nothing else matters. For most companies the Value only gets better when support runs out for the current product. It then becomes "expensive" to keep that old product. The cost of switching to a new OS is huge and if you have ever been in IT management at bigger than a company with 500 desktops you would understand the cost of migrating. The cost of licensing is easy fixed cost. Support costs are huge and some of its hidden. If you build up IT staff, help desk, desktop deployment teams that spend many manweeks developing training, support training, corporate builds, that are tested against a hardware and software, that costs lots of $$$$. Now you have to do all of it over again. That does not even begin to calculate the cost of lost productivity when Windows 7 is unleashed on users. Even with good user training, a new OS is going to generate support calls, lots of them. My company over the last few years has been able to draw down the support staff because the environment is so stable and we have not unleashed anything drastically different or new on the user community. I have lots of friend at different corporations and none of them has said they plan to move off of XP anytime soon. It works, users dont like change and there is NO compelling reason to move off of it. If you are moving to VDI's, as in the case at my company then XP is better since you can setup a typical VDI user with 512meg of RAM and a 10gig drive. If we move to 7 we would have to double that, if not more on the disk space side of things. Which means way more SAN space, and bigger/more ESX servers to support the same # of users. I am not saying stick with XP forever, but you better have some really good reasons to make the move and be able to justify the enormous costs. This is interesting. I guess sticking with XP for at least another year would be the majority move. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10217917-75.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksA...

@Lindy - You hit the nail on the head...but of course you and I have been called bad at IT before for having such a real workd view of things. Read my posts on basically the same view in today's other thread. The evangelists, sales people, and basement kiddies do not see it from our viewpoint. It is obvious who they are on this site...it doesn't matter if it is Windows, OS X, Unix, or a Mainframe OS, like zOS/OS390. Upgrades take time and are costly in our world. As a home user and generally a gadget freak...I say, "bring it on...I want to play with it"; but that does not work in a large production shop. --tayme

Another article : >>survey results indicate that Windows 7 will suffer for the sins of Vista. The leading reason for resistance to Windows 7 adoption, according to the report, is Vista compatibility problems as well as "a negative public perception of Vista that seems to have helped build this layer of distrust with Windows 7," says Diane Hagglund, senior research analyst for Dimensional Research and author of the survey. Some other concerns that IT professionals listed in the survey about moving to Windows 7: software compatibility, cost of implementation and the economic downturn. << http://www.cio.com/article/489085/Economy_Vista_Reputation_Slowing_Windo...

Something else: >>Bad numbers from HTC last week: Taiwan smartphone maker HTC on Monday posted a 30 percent dip in its first-quarter earnings, as the economic crisis sapped demand for the company’s feature-jammed mobile phones.<< What did we learn a while ago? >>At Microsoft’s press conference yesterday at Mobile World Congress, if you tied two threads together, you learned a very interesting fact about HTC, one of the company’s closest handset makers — the Taiwanese company is responsible for 80 percent of Windows Mobile phone sales.<< That's what that whistling sound I heard was. Windows Mobile market share crashing down... http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/13/htc-winmo

Although I'm in the "time to move on" camp, face it a lot of people still need XP for some programs, and some of these are in government and enterprise. I think they should keep selling XP and supporting it because its better than losing sales, and these days who is turning money away when someone try's to hand it to you. Personally using XP is not something I enjoy, finding documents and search in general has always been Vista's "killer app" and hate not having it.

"I wonder how painful the migration cost will be when you guys finally get your businesses migrated to Windows 7?" It wont be, because we will have IT people like you pulling the wool over the business side of the house, by telling them its imperative to migrate the day after it comes out. You will do your best to hide the costs. So whatever you and other like you must spend to get there, will translate into lots of lessons learned for us to avoid. Plus you will help drive down the cost by being a early adopter and finding the problems for the rest of us. In the meantime I will keep getting my bonus for keeping the costs down and up time where the business likes it.

@subzero - "So you're going to keep running a security prone, higher costing to maintain OS, when you've had 2 years and 2 months to test and roll out Vista? When other businesses already HAVE tested and migrated to Vista?" Nope...my company has Vista approved for most applications....but there are some that still will not work. Plus, if you are relying only on the OS for security, then it is no wonder that you have to fight malware constantly. There is also W7 testing going on right now, but I guarantee that we will not have 7 approved for desktop use for at least a year. No surprise there. In the datacenter, we still have Windows servers running 2000, but most are on 2003. Our bigger OLTP stuff runs on Solaris and IBM zOS...we are generally 1 version back on those. We have NEVER had a virus attack in the 15 years that I have been with the company. We occasionally get spammed so bad that our Exchange environment gets bogged down filtering out the spam, but nothing malicious. So, now I hope you understand what I am saying...without a plan, upgrading is costly and time consuming. Even with a plan...but at least with a plan, there is less that should go wrong. I do not condone continuing with non-supported, unsafe environments. The non-support people here do not get that, the true support people do. Which are you? --tayme

Trouble for Windows Mobile: http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-mwc-we-learned-just-how-great-of-a-par...

For clarification purposes...Bobbi Jo fits into the basement kiddies group in my posts here. Bobbi Jo obviously knows absolutely nothing about real IT. Only that his daddy's Mac has that shiny apple logo on the aluminum case and it looks cool in the dark basement! --tayme

@sub: agreed with your entire first comment @lindy: clearly you've never tried proper deployment of Windows Vista, otherwise you would know how much easier it is. Image deployment is fast on any platform, but building those images is the complicated part, and XP just can't compare to Vista. HAL independence is one of the primary reasons why Vista deployment is leaps and bounds over XP. If you actually had a clue, you'd use the virtualization offerings in a Microsoft Enterprise agreement without having to pay extra for VMware on the desktop. Also, I know of two local companies that are using cheap netbooks as loaners to mobile workers. They both use Vista Enterprise on them. The new netbooks that offer 2GB of RAM and the N280 processors are a good value for a mobile worker at well less than $500CDN. Plus, they're usually a bit more rugged than a standard laptop because of the density over size ratio of the plastic casing. As far as your statement about Office 2007, you've clearly never loaded it on a clean Vista install. I use an E8400 with 2GB of RAM with Office Enterprise 2007 and Exchange on SBS 2008. Outlook loads up as fast as the Aero fade-in can draw the windows, and my personal email database is 1.5GB of just email. I don't get big attachments that offten, so that's thousands of messages that it loads everytime it loads up. Outlook 2003 on XP was NEVER: even close to that fast. @losta: you always miss the point. sub was talking about selling XP. Nobody needs to suffer that experience when Windows 7 gives you Vista's multimedia, security, and deployment benefits with XP's memory requirements. @Ocean: people are waiting for the Windows Mobile 6.5 phones that were announced at the MWC. "The smart businesses are already testing Windows 7." @sub: That's not the company that Lindy works for. IDE hard drives are pulling in a 50% premium cost over SATA, and DDR1 RAM is double the price of DDR2. "The marketing department insisted that they needed to use Macs...they still do today. Management approved it." My question is: Who the H3LL runs your IT department to let something like that be dictated by marketing directly to management? I'd hate to work for the company you work for. That company obviously doesn't have an IT manager filtering IT purchase requests before they get to the BDM. It's no wonder you don't take any initiative. @all: I'd like to see how you can validate cost savings of running new hardware on old software when a lot of the drivers that allow the newer hardware to work don't take full advantage of it on XP. Likewise, when you look at deployment on new hardware, adding drivers and rebuilding images is a PiTA on XP, unless you're using expensive third-party software to eliminate a lot of the manual scripting required. On Vista, even mid-sized businesses can get away with using the free Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which supports XP, but is still a major PiTA. Vista deployment is simple, since you can reuse images on multitudes of hardware configurations without rebuilding images. You can inject drivers offline (if necessary), and literally push out an XYZ-hardware software image to an ABC-hardware computer. BTW: Gigabyte has a system out that is almost identical to the Asus EeePC 1000HE, which is considered the best value netbook shipping at the moment. The Asus has an Atom N280 (1.66GHz vs. the typical 1.60 N270), 1GB of DDR2-667 RAM upgradeable to 2GB, 160GB upgradeable hard drive, WiFi-N, Bluetooth 2.1, multi-touch trackpad, 1.3Mp webcam, and a *9.5 hour battery*. The Gigabyte T1028 is nearly the same, but lacks the long battery life (it's 6hrs instead), and AFAIK also lacks the multi-touch trackpad, but it's a convertible tablet PC. Both are 10" screens. The Gigabyte is supposed to be very cheap (ie. ~$100 more than the Asus for the touchscreen). Both are very good machines that will run Windows 7 well when it comes out later this year. The Asus is very durable too. A little heavier than an Acer, and has many more "premium" features over the Acer (namely the BT, WiFi-N, long battery, and multi-touch) for only about $15 more.

@tayme: "Bobbi Jo obviously knows absolutely nothing about real IT" I'm sure I could run circles around you when it comes to knowing about IT.

@ weathorn "clearly you've never tried proper deployment of Windows Vista" Nope I got WDS down. Its much nicer than RIS, especially when using Vista and 2008 WDS server. That is the easy part, and just a very small part of it. Testing 300+ corporate applications with Vista, and having roughly 78 of them fail to run, shot down Vista pretty fast. Most of those were in house, some were not, like our Cisco VPN software. There is now newer VPN software now, but at the time there was not and even then ripping out what worked to replace it, test it, configure it, educuate users on how to use new VPN software from home etc, was not worth the cost. This is what you dont get. Just replacing VPN software to make it work with Vista was costly, and that was just one application of the 78 (if I remember correctly) that did not work. Again for you, slower now V a l u e < C o s t = No Vista V a l u e > C o s t = Vista I could send you a Visio diagram with pretty pictures if that is not sinking in. Probably pretty tough to get running a small computer shop. Think about migrating 110,000 users and all that would cost??? I get your points about some new hardware not having drivers, especially on consumer lines, but Dell keeps providing us with our XP installed image on hardware as new as of April 2009. We are moving rapidly to VDI's for anyone that does not need a notebook or a powerful desktop. We are thinking 75% of our users and that is a very conservative estimate. With XP on a VMware server, I wont have any driver issues, period. I wont care what CPU's are in them, deploying XP from a template is faster and better than WDS will ever be period. Flex cloning on a NetApp SAN means I minimize the disk space by only having one disk image per volume.

@Lindy - You are right...NetApp filers do the trick in almost every environment. OLTP still needs the 10g SAN though...at least it is outperforming NAS at this point in our shop. --tayme

@subzero - Where did I say that it is more important to stay on XP? I said that it is important to make sure that you test every application and transaction type before upgrading any OS...whether it is Windows, OS X, zOS, Solaris, HP-UX...it is all really the same. Do you work in IT? I am curious how big is your user base? Where I work we have over 200,000 users, thousands of servers(Win & *NIX), several IBM mainframes, many mid-range systems, half a dozen datacenters, and over 15 petabytes of storage. Politics plays into many purchasing decisions. --tayme

@robertsjoe Does this..... REALLY HAVE TO BE FUGKING EXPLAINED TO RETARDS LIKE YOU AGAIN! That other idiot, Ocean already tried running that troll. Paul, will you PLEASE institute some blanking moderation on this blog other than blanking out swear words!

Master you seriously have anger management problem. Get some help. My free advice.......why even read his posts? He is pushing your buttons and when you respond with that temper of yours its like saying "may I have another" It is entertaining though.

Yes please. Can we ban accounts like @master3 please? Those sorts of insults and swearing is not (and should not) be welcomed here. Thanks.

I'll hang on to XP till support ends and serious security vulnerabilities start going unpatched. Until Microsoft adds back critical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_from_Windows_Vista and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_from_Windows_7. I'm a loyal Windows user and Microsoft have to right to remove some lesser used features, some of which were not even obsolete though not all. I prefer the successful Windows XP user interface to Vista's/Windows 7's mess. Give me back all the lost features and I'll upgrade in the blink of an eye.

This is an amusing discussion to watch, really. Lindy, tayme, you're both right. Vista wasn't a great choice for corporate environments. The new driver model and UAC did, indeed break a lot of stuff--particularly custom apps. And, yes, Win7 could be essentially labelled "Vista SP2 (3?)". BUT, Win7's going to be a success anyway. Here's why: 1) Pretty much all of the commercial software that broke in Vista has been fixed now. I see nothing to indicate that Win7 is going to introduce any unique compatibility problems. 2) A lot of the software that had problems with UAC did so for good reason; in many cases, custom apps were horribly insecure, even when limited to a firewalled corporate network. Hopefully, in most cases these apps have been fixed by now. The shop I work in still has an NT server in production. I know about legacy. 3) For those apps in 2) that HAVEN'T been fixed, the options for virtualization and remote access have improved considerably, and gotten cheaper to boot. 4) While I know there are still a lot of VB6 programmers out there, the world is slowly moving to .NET, even for custom corporate apps. 5) Most importantly, Win7 looks on target to actually OUTPERFORM XP! It's a smaller footprint than Vista, and it seems to run much more efficiently. There may actually be an ROI argument for Win7 that was never there for Vista.

LuxZg you are right as well. If I was setting a new small business, or one that wanted to revamp it all right now, then I would go with Vista/7 and SBS 2008. Those products are better overall. I think Windows 2008 is a great product. With a new or small company its a lot easier to do. The only thing that would stop that is there might be a specific application that a small company runs that has not been updated to run with Vista. Lots of small companies use industry specific software made by vendors that dont move very fast. That is the reason most wont ever switch to Mac. Most of those should be Vista aware by now though.

Just a part of what makes up the enormous Microsoft tax that people have to pay: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&... Not just that specific incident. But similar things that happens thousands of times, over and over.