Many XP systems cannot be upgraded to another version of Windows, at least officially the hardware isn't adequate. On the other hand there was a huge opportunity to switch these systems to Linux if there had been a savvy distro with a little cash and a business model. But I fear that bus has left the station.
I'm one of those people unfortunately.<p>XP was all I needed for a decade. My firewall which has thousands of rules does not work with anything newer and other firewalls suck today, very badly.<p>I have many many programs which are licensed and I do not want to have to try to find the key for each one again, heck find the program again, only to find out it doesn't work beyond XP.<p>XP was just a launching UI for me, really could not care about how it looked. I have it very locked down and very tweaked.<p>And I really do not want to lose the months of getting something configured again. But come mid-April I won't have a choice.
Uh, ATMs use Windows XP Embedded, which isn't really the same thing and is <i>not</i> at EOL. Microsoft said they'll support Embedded at least until 2016.
Why do I still use Windows XP? Because Microsoft charges too much for Windows-8. Right now I am running XP in virtual box on my Linux workstation, and everything works fine. Why would I pay to upgrade to Windows-8 knowing that I might have trouble installing Windows-8 in virtualbox. There is no point.
This is a good opportunity for institutions to move to Linux instead of Windows 8, if they're going to have to train their users to use it anyway:<p><a href="https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/education-ministry-romania-endorses-ubuntu" rel="nofollow">https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/education-mi...</a><p>As for why ATM's aren't using Linux, is beyond me. I guess Microsoft got to them first. This is the problem with open source projects over commercial solutions - there's hardly anyone out there working hard to <i>promote</i> that solution to users, other than the "community".<p>Things are changing and the community and social media can have a bigger impact, but not when these ATM owners had to make the choice, and Microsoft is still spending billions on promoting their stuff.
"Shit, for some reason people don't want to drop a wad of cash on a upgrade that provides no benefit to them and may not run effectively on their hardware. I don't understand it! Haven't these jerks heard of <i>progress?</i>"
What could be interesting will be percentage of computers running Windows 7 at EOL. My bet is it will be the same or higher. I don't see many companies jumping on the Windows 8 bandwagon any time soon, especially with how much "less buggy" 7 is versus 8.x.