Oh please! Microsoft EXTENDED the extended support window for XP by 3 years after an uproar in the community. Microsoft spent over a billion dollars to continue writing patches for XP. That includes salaries for programmers, coding newer versions of .NET for the older XP kernel, and maintaining call center support for XP users. Microsoft bent over backwards to keep XP alive, but they told EVERYONE years ago that April 8, 2014 was the end of it all. 3 years is a lifetime in IT.
Agreed. They've 'supported' (as a consumer, when was the last time you actually got 'support' from Microsoft?) this OS for a lot longer than most software companies would. Of course, they've also made a lot of money from it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I've always considered it to be an inferior operating system at best. It wasn't even worth using at all until SP2.
I understand some industries use XP for heavy equipment operations. My only question/concern there: if that machine is compromised, do you really want some hacker half a world away to be able to take control while the safety of people is at hand? It's disturbing how much XP is still out there, esp. if you understand from the IT security perspective how vulnerable those systems are now.
Agreed. Companies have had a lot of time to migrate to something more recent.
Problem is, computers have gotten powerful enough that not even Microsoft bloatware can really slow it down enough to make people need to upgrade. Most people don't install their own operating system at all. Consumers in general are as ignorant of computers, and how to use and secure them properly as they are of anything else, if not more so. If your computer continues to function, people are really not interested in making major changes to them. This is a serious problem for companies like Microsoft, which is why they are pushing the subscription model so hard. The vast majority of users have no need whatsoever of the new "features" of Microsoft's bread and butter products like Office. The are perfectly happy using a 15-year old operating system with Office 97 installed because it does everything they need it to do. As long as they stay away from Microsoft internet browsers, (which are a driver for OS upgrades) they can continue to use it until their hardware physically dies. Microsoft is not making any money at all off of these folks.
From a technological standpoint, computers have generally become much more of a 'durable good' than something that really needs to be disposed of every three to five years. You see that businesses have fully embraced that, by the sheer number of computers in use that are 5+ years old. If MS is going to commit fully to the 'subscription' model, they really need to make their operating more modular so they could do 'continuous' upgrades, like some of the Linux distributions are doing.
Unfortunately more OS developers are going the route of “continuous upgrades” with long term support (LTS) while supporting specific hardware models. I’m thinking specifically of iOS on Apple products and more generally of Android on compatible devices. If manufacturers can program to specific hardware platforms, it makes support easier.
Microsoft’s “problem,” if it really is one, is that they are generally platform agnostic. If you can present storage to a device, you can install Windows on it. This has caused Microsoft’s supported software requirements bloat to the point that the OS has grown to 4 GB of compressed operating system goodness while Android and iOS can run on less than 1 GB of available disk. Even Linux can be cherry-picked down to a sleek 250 Mb with some distros.
Hardware is a durable good insomuch as it can be reused, but as operating systems and computing platform requirements improve, older hardware becomes difficult to program to. I can point to Broadcom as a good example of a manufacturer that just cuts off old hardware at the knees and refuses to provide back-channel support to developers. Try getting wireless to work with Linux on a 10 year old laptop, and you’ll find how futile it can be to support older hardware.
Microsoft’s subscription model will be optional, but it’s already in place with products such as Office 365 where most of your Office platform is configured and accessible only through an Internet-enable device. When they start with the old dumb-terminal model where we have a WYSE device in our homes connected to the Internet and presenting everything to us, only then will I agree on the durable good idea, but then there will always be those of us, myself included, who want the horsepower in the home office and not at some distributed data center halfway across the country.