I think that Microsoft made a great example of long term support, but I have to agree with the big red "Honestly, it's time for a change" at the top of the page. It's a twelve year old product, I'm honestly amazed to find any users left. Yeah, many businesses may be using XP, which sadly includes almost ATM in the US, but this end of support has been coming for a long, long time and upgrading to newer, likely better software is something that needs to be done.<p>Additionally, am I the only person who has no major problems with Windows 8.1? Yeah, Metro isn't great on my non-touchscreen monitor but I'm not going to avoid using it because I don't like the UI. (In all fairness, I only run it on a gaming PC and my school/work machine runs OS X...) I'd love to see more lower and middle end options that run Linux, but until then I think ending support for XP is actually a good thing. You can't be hung up on old technology forever.
Windows XP was an extremely successful product. I have great respect for Microsoft for supporting it for 12 years. That's a great example of "long term support".
This website is really well done. I love the 'Honestly...It's time for a change.'<p>Not sure why ending support is controversial for some people. Support for XP HAS to end at some point. It doesn't make business sense for them to keep putting money into it.<p>I don't think anyone would suggest they should still support MS-DOS, so why XP?
This is all very well for retail customers, but it's much harder in enterprise.<p>Fortunately, there's Windows POSReady 2009 which is essentially Windows XP under the hood as an absolute fallback as it's supported until 2019.<p>Although I agree with Microsoft's approach and using POSReady is not the best option, it does bridge the gap for those businesses who are waiting on third parties to make decisions on which options are to be supported or indeed find a suitable option.
I just bought an old ~2008 netbook that came with a fresh install of XP on it. I was shocked at how slow and unresponsive it was. I really don't imagine windows 8 would improve the situation at all, quite the opposite, I suspect the machine would be completely unusable.<p>Reinstalling Arch with XMonad as a simple display manager and the netbook is now seriously snappy. Boot time is just a few seconds from start to surfing... and that includes typing 'startx'.<p>Obviously few people would be techie enough or want to go through the evening it took to set it up. But really the difference between free for a working machine and $199 for a pile of sludge is a bit much in my opinion. I imagine there is a huge gap here for Linux to fill for all that old hardware that still works but needs an OS that will still work with it.
I can understand why they are doing this but it is a bit concerning from a security perspective. Vulnerable machines affect all of us. They can be infected with DDoS bots and other things that aren't just damaging to the owner of the given machine.<p>I guess the upside might be that this could actually be one of the few things that will get some people to upgrade who would otherwise never have done so.
Joking aside, I'm surprised more isn't being made of Balmer's hand in this mess. Some of XP's staying power is surely due to it's being the first "good enough" Microsoft desktop OS (win2k notwithstanding), but the back-to-back failures or Longhorn and Vista had to have an enormous hand in a generation of users never upgrading. That eight year chasm is breathtaking.
I think they will have to reconsider retiring support, they will probably see that not many users crowd for Win 8, by that time it would had been too late. Many businesses along with XP may use some other services from Microsoft.
Kind of interesting - that page implies ("Step 3" illustration) that their recommended solution for Windows XP upgrade involves buying a new computer...