But I've got small business clients whose custom written business software applications, and in some cases mission critical tools no longer supported by the manufacturer, run on XP. They CANNOT be upgraded to Win7, and replacement or rewrite is prohibitively expensive. It would put them out of business.
Microsoft could make continuing support available at a reasonable cost -- they are already going to be developing and distributing the security updates. But they won't. That's inexcusably lame.
Oh boy.
Third party support patches will be available for Windows XP now that Microsoft has ceased supporting it.
People will find a way to keep it running.
Putting your clients in a pinch is something they should remember about Microsoft... they exist to sell you OS upgrades. That's reason enough to get off the MS train.
Yes, Big Windows can do this to them once. But once your clients have got this problem solved, they will find a way to ensure that it never happens again. I'm guessing that some flavor of Linux will be in their futures.
Ms is a business. They get to choose what they do.
They gave everyone several years notice. If the irs cant pull its head out of its butt then they are at fault.
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.
I've worked in a healthcare setting where a LOT of legacy applications ran critical systems including registration, bed tracking, pharmacy applications, and the like. They kept XP around, because those vendors went out of business, but ya know what? The hospital system for which I worked saw the writing on the wall back in 2010, and they contracted new vendors to come in and replace the old systems.
I currently work in the financial industry, and we have XP in our environment to support financial applications that are over 10 years old. The problem? Those applications were coded by people who have long since left the company, and no one wants to re-write them or provide a better solution. Meanwhile, we've had to pull access from those terminals down to bare bones due to security concerns that keep our risk management people awake at night.
Point is, you've had 5 years to research and deploy replacements for systems. If your systems are not on a network or on the Internet, then continue using them until they die unceremonious deaths. If they're on the Internet or connected to a network, Microsoft's provided 3 operating systems since XP (4, if you consider ME, but no one takes it seriously), so there's really no excuse for not migrating to a new platform.
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.
Windows 7 XP Mode will run 99% of all applications that required Windows XP on Windows 7. Google it and learn.
It’s very short-sighted (aka stupid) to tie yourself to custom business software that either can’t be upgraded/exported to another platform or you won’t do either b/c of cost.