They’d still need patches and support. Things break. The things that run in VMs ARE full/ original OSes, really in most VM environments you can point them at a disk and install them. Rewriting dead OSes that they don’t want to support anymore as VM onlyware would be a waste of time.
I don’t understand the hugh and cry on this. It’s a 13 OS, we’ve known for years the EOL was coming, everybody who wanted to keep using it had plenty of time to get prepped. People didn’t freak out when 3.1 got EOLed, nobody cared when it was 95’s turn, or 98. Why is XP’s death this great tragedy? You’ve had time to deal with this day, nobody’s fault but your if you didn’t.
Not for the person who has a million dollar instrument that is being controlled by specialty software that ONLY RUNS on a specific version of the Windows OS. This problem is currently only solvable by buying a new PC specifically built to run the older OS.
It has zip to do with "XP" or any other version. This would offer those customers a different way forward, and allow them use any modern hardware and still control their very expensive equipment.
And it would give them a major "leg up" over Apple, whose attitude toward backward compatibility has always been "tuff titty".