Microsoft wants to drop support for Windows XP. They have agreed to continue to allow downgrades from W7 (primarily for enterprise customers and netbook buyers) but they have discontinued support for XP SP2. Support for XP SP3 will continue into 2014. In an eWeek.com article, Don Reisinger offers ten reasons why Microsoft must offer long-term support for XP. (I had to read the story on my desktop, of course.)
According to a study Reisinger cites, of 278,498 corporate and public sector PCs analyzed, “almost half are still running Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2.” Analysis and marketing firm Net Applications reports that as of June 2010, XP is running on 62% of the world’s PCs.
A lot of XP’s persistence can be attributed to IT departments’ unwillingness to upgrade, but that resistance is showing signs of beginning to crumble. The combination of technical obsolescence, a tentative economic recovery, and pressure from Microsoft may make some of Reisinger’s reasons less compelling in the next year or two. But his third reason caught my attention:
Discussions about Microsoft’s decision to discontinue its support for Service Pack 2 have left out a key component that can’t be overlooked: People in developing countries rely on XP…. But if [Microsoft] decides to turn its back on XP before it should, the company would also effectively turn its back on people all over the world who rely on XP to get technology into their lives.
If the enterprise does finally let go of XP, the financial pressure on Microsoft to abandon it altogether would certainly increase. But what of those non-enterprise users both here and abroad who depend on XP? What if W7 is not an option, whether because of hardware limitations or the cost of upgrading?
it’s easy to imagine the XP ecosystem reduced to a stagnant backwater where applications go to die and tens of millions of un-patched, increasingly vulnerable computers remain attached to the Internet, running browsers that can’t render HTML5 and CSS3.
In that world, the only realistic alternative would be Linux. If Microsoft were to walk away from XP, it would accomplish what Linux evangelists and fanboys have been unable to do – convert millions of users from Windows to Linux. And once converted, these users would never again be Microsoft customers.
A radical proposal
Other than continuing support for XP forever, there is one way Microsoft can hang on to those users and hope to upgrade them to Windows 8 or 9 or whatever and bring them back into the market for Windows applications: Open-source XP. Once the enterprise is safely in the W7 (or W8) fold, the financial impact to Microsoft would be minimal. An open source XP would attract more developers than a dead, closed XP would. Users would benefit. And Microsoft could actually look pretty good.
I’m just sayin’
