I hope our best friend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't read news. He thinks he owes the USA a practical joke of Natanz size.
Why cant they adapt? My company transitioned to 7 with almost zero hiccups and it is used in a lab setting.
Lab setting is a small pain. But imagine that you bought a CNC mill for $100K a while ago, and some software for it - like, say, Delcam PowerMill or MasterCAM. The total cost is maybe $130K. It all runs on XP, correctly and flawlessly (as far as those things go.) Do you feel lucky to wipe that XP box clean and install shiny new Windows 7? Are you sure that these programs are supported? Are you sure that they actually work correctly, each and every time? Will you be happy knowing that if anything goes wrong you will not be supported by manufacturers of any of these systems? That stuff is not cheap, you cannot just go to Fry's and buy a new USB camera instead of one that is no longer supported. At one place I saw an expensive universal programmer connected to a DOS machine. This is because the software for the box works only in DOS, and nowhere else. Can you replace it? Sure, just pay money. What will your boss say if you tell him that you want to spend big bucks just to stay at the same place?
Or, since you are talking about lab use, consider that often modern test equipment runs Windows XP. All Agilent spectrum analyzers, network analyzers, and such run XP. Do you think you can upgrade it there? You have no custom drivers for the instruments' interfaces, and you don't know even what computer board it runs on. An upgrade is impossible outside of Agilent (and they aren't going to do it anyway.)
There are also industrial controllers that are nothing but black boxes. They have terminals for motors and sensors, and an Ethernet jack. The rest is magic. Often they run Windows. You cannot upgrade this to Windows 7 or 8. Those boxes operate hundreds of thousands of meters, sensors, valves, motors, pumps, heaters, coolers, and everything else that you can find at a chemical plant, like a refinery, or anywhere else to that matter, from nuclear plants to sewage processing facilities. We cannot have a man at every switch and at every dial. Iranian centrifuges were ran by these boxes not because Iran doesn't have enough Iranians to run them manually; it's because you cannot run such machines by hand; control loop problems are too complex for a human mind.
Honestly not going to argue. Those companies should be supporting their equipment in all phases. While it may benefit a few of MS customers to maintain support for older OS’s it does not make financial sense to continue to spend resources for very people. So in other words your issues shouldnt be with MS but with the manufacturer of machines worth thousands and thousands of dollars but doesnt work on solutions to make sure support continues with newer OS’s. BioTech the company we use for our lab is able to get their older DNA sequencers and other machines to work with 7..our mass spectrometers..scales..recorders etc..all work with 7.
Big datacenters have a lot of old code that they run in Virtual Machines.
It would likely take a knowledgable System Programmer to work his way thru each of the individual programs.
Would allow moving to later PCs...that would not cost that much and would be much more reliable.