Why hasn't XP died yet

Post Reply New Topic

XP has only been supported for so long because it was the first NT-based OS to be released for the general public (as opposed to businesses and educational facilities) Also, the fact that Windows ME was terrible, and the long delay for it's successor (Vista, which gained much negative press), also helped give XP a strong foothold. It also runs on pretty much the majority of computers that still work today.

XP has not died in an enterprose point of view because a lot of enterprise programs were written to work with IE6, which came with XP.

Microsoft doesn't seem to grasp the concept that owners (especially businesses) can't justify all the new software and hardware upgrades a new OS may mandate system-wide and as such, they choose not to upgrade.

OS upgrades that coincide with a need to retool a whole division (e.g., 10 years) will sell better than those coming out when it's not really necessary.

This, though not necessarily only because of IE6.

A lot of industries have to deal with poorly written, tightly coupled applications that are extremely reliant on the low level structure of the operating system and driver layer (this is especially true in industries with domain specific applications for the management of specific purpose driven hardware, think manufacturing, power grid management, etc). When the OS upgrade is going to break these applications and force an extremely expensive upgrade price for a new version of the custom software to work with the new OS (often these custom software systems can end up costing millions of dollars for an organization because they're so purpose built and there's a low number of users, requiring the profit margins to be high to justify producing it), and the other option is to simply reject the upgrade and keep on trucking, the latter will always be chosen.

It's the reason why you still often see 30 year old mainframes in use in enterprises.

Agreed,
When I used to run the network for my last company, we actually used to downgrade new machines to XP. This was because half of the hardware we had wouldn't work on anything else, and especially most of the custom software. There were a lot of very good features in XP that Microsoft dumped with vista, and that made upgrading nearly impossible for those companies that had invested in using those features.

I still used XP on my machine up until january this year, when I switched to a mac. And even now I have XP running on Virtualbox on my Mac. (I do have a copy of windows 7 which wasn't too bad, but it was still not as fast and efficient as XP)

I still use XP a lot. My main computer had Xp, but It crashed recently. I need to Fix it sometime soon (Procrastination ). I've used XP my whole life. I'm kinda sad to see it depart that day on April 2014...