Ron Schenone

Microsoft Ends XP Support – Will Businesses Upgrade?

Posted by on Mar 10, 2009 | 5 Comments

Now that Microsoft has confirmed that support for Windows XP and Office 2003 will end on April 14, 2009, will businesses flock to Vista or Windows 7? That is the question that XP shops will be asking themselves this year at a time that our economy struggles to heal itself. The bottom line is whether businesses can afford to upgrade. Microsoft hasn’t released their pricing for Windows 7 as of yet.

Just because Steve Ballmer says that Windows 7 will be the best version of Windows ever, will this be enough? If the economy was in better shape I believe that companies would of upgraded to Windows 7 eventually. But now …….. I doubt any company is in a position to upgrade just to line the coffers of Microsoft.

So what do you think businesses will do? Keep churning along with XP, 2000 or even 98 or go for it?

Better yet. In this economic environment would it be financially irresponsible to upgrade if the equipment you currently have serves its purpose?

Comments welcome.

  • mhz

    XP will remain for the foreseeable future. We’ll have to buy licenses for the newer product of course, but we will continue to install XP on PCs that we roll out.

    With XP SP3 and virus protection, etc. we can maintain the current level for a long, long time.

    Sorry MS, you made XP pretty good, so customers like to use it. MS may not like it, but its the truth that customers just want a good product to standardize on. Once its good and stable enough to use, people don’t want to bother with upgrades anymore.

    What customers want is completely different than what sellers want. MS wants to keep replacing good stable code with new, buggy code, and begin the 5 year process of patching all over again.

    Customers want to take advantage of the all the time and money investment in WinXP, and use it until Linux comes out with a suitable replacement. What, are we supposed to be “loyal” to their brand or something?

    We are CUSTOMERS. We serve our own company interests. We’re not going to spend loads more training/testing money, and give ourselves all the new maintenance hassles until the alternative is physical or career death.

  • Jeff

    I don’t think business will end their use of windows XP any time soon. windows 3.1 just officially ended its life cycle (used in airport terminals) recently and that was still going strong in its own right. Microsoft can put arbitrary dates on when they stop supporting it, but as long as someone saves the updates, and has a install disc, you will see it in use.

    It makes no sense to upgrade as a business now. Not only is upgrading technologies risky, but it leads to lowered productivity as people adjust to the new system, putting those already at risk into the red.

    If nothing else its a move by microsoft to force people out of XP. something they should have realized when they made the OS – its a great system that is stable, and it was around so long no one wants to readjust. If they end support this year, and force people to vista, they will suffer lower sales of windows 7 as people won’t want to upgrade 2 times in 1 year. This also means that they are priming for 7 but leaving companies who can’t afford new systems high and dry, and looking for an alternative that is less expensive.

    Fortunately for microsoft, Linux doesn’t have nearly the pull, and Apple is content with catering to the elite and wealthy user. leaving MS to continue to dominate the low to mid range computer market, meaning its their game to make the rules for.

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

    mhz,
    MS did make XP pretty good. It actually works and is easy to use. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

    Heh Jeff,
    Good points.

    ‘Fortunately for microsoft, Linux doesn’t have nearly the pull, and Apple is content with catering to the elite and wealthy user. leaving MS to continue to dominate the low to mid range computer market, meaning its their game to make the rules for.’

    Exactly!

  • leftystrat

    It won’t make a lot of difference at work. I can’t remember ever calling MS for XP support :)

    As far as I know, vendors will still be offering it on new (business) systems (they call it a downgrade, I call it an upgrade). Even if they weren’t, I’d still use XP.

    In any enterprise you have really WEIRD legacy apps. Either they’re long out of production or they won’t run on anything past XP, so you use XP or spend who knows how much replacing the legacy apps. Considering we’re using a $1.5 million accounting package, I don’t think the OS is going to be given a higher priority. Stupid program won’t even run under Firefox, no less Vista or 7.

    We’ll certainly evaluate 7 and whatever servers come out but MS isn’t setting the pace – we are.

    I strongly suspect we’re going to go largely linux, except where absolutely necessary.

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