Millions in Asia still on Windows XP

For the avg user that only needs internet, office, and music&#x2F;movies Windows XP is good enough. What does Vista&#x2F;7&#x2F;8 offer a person using a Pentium 4 level computer? Nothing really worth paying for.<p>I am surprised MS doesn&#x27;t get more credit for XP which could be seen as a relativity dependable workhorse. Problem is for MS of course they ended the need for the users to upgrade.

Of course these users would likely be well served(for the most part) by a GNU&#x2F;Linux distribution, and with many of them the difference between XP and Windows 8 may be greater than the differences between XP and a typical CentOS installation, or even some of the more adventurous environments. The great thing is, in relation to the concerns Microsoft has put on this infographic, Windows 8 is not the natural choice.

Not just Asia, I&#x27;ve yet to find something that I need beyond XP for, and the US government uses XP everywhere.<p>(though Firefox lack of mpeg4 support is annoying because we don&#x27;t have windows media foundation on XP)<p>Will grudgingly look at Windows 7 in 2014 when security fixes cease.

What on earth does it mean to say &quot;Windows XP with SP3 is 56.5 times more vulnerable than Windows 8 RTM&quot; ?<p>I guess it&#x27;s this some attempt to quantify how often XP machines get infected vs Windows 8. But a good part of that is probably because XP users are less technically proficient than the kind of people who&#x27;ve upgraded to 8.<p>If you&#x27;re a CTO for a business then most of these details probably don&#x27;t matter. All they really need to say is &quot;no more updates next year, so soon you&#x27;ll be directly vulnerable&quot;.

South Korea&#x27;s dependence on Windows seems to continue; I wonder how much is related to SEED, the weird crypto-via-ActiveX implementation that&#x27;s held them hostage all these years. (<a href="http://kanai.net/weblog/archive/2007/01/26/00h53m55s" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kanai.net&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2007&#x2F;01&#x2F;26&#x2F;00h53m55s</a>)

The simple truth is that corporate users tend to be very cautious about upgrading (and who can blame your average IT department for its conservatism) and many individual users only upgrade when they buy a new PC.<p>In my feeling, by analogy, Windows 2000 was like when they first put modern electronic ignitions and truly reliable fuel injection in passenger cars (making a whole class of maintenance and problems a thing of the past). Now it&#x27;s just like buying the latest boring mid-sized sedan with slightly different styling.<p>For me, Mac OS X, ten years ago, was like getting a Tesla. Desktop OSes have become such a commodity since then though.<p>As much as I don&#x27;t like the iOS model and its restrictions and business model, it&#x27;s probably the first serious innovation in &quot;desktop&quot; OS products in a while.

That&#x27;s funny - I wonder why we dont see any stats for India, definitely one of the largest markets.<p>sidenote: For those that believe that these guys can upgrade to Linux, that will only happen on the basis of a single piece of software - Excel. And no, OO&#x2F;LibreO is not good enough.

Asia is not stuck on XP because it&#x27;s more or less secure. Asia is stuck on XP simply because of piracy (which kind of seems to argue it&#x27;s less secure, but anyway).<p>Most people over there are running pirated XP. I worked at a company that had Asian partners and we found even legitimate companies over there had office consoles on Pirated XP. That was a shock to us.<p>The really shitty downside of this is most users are using IE8 or lower and sometimes newer versions of .NET couldn&#x27;t be used in our software builds. Business dudes always wanted us to design our web pages to appease these customers, which became increasingly difficult as technology goes forth.

It&#x27;s not just Asia. Firefox has a global population of hundreds of millions of users and our data says that ~30% of the WORLD is still on XP.

I just finished a project where I worked as a front-end lead developer using HTML5, CSS3, jquery, bootstrap, backbone.js and all I had was a trusted XP machine provided by my employer. It was fine and I don&#x27;t see any point in this argument. Unless you are doing an earth shattering and mind numbing things. Honestly developers can live and work well with XP machine. I am the living proof.

The Chinese government should try and switch the Chinese faster to the new national OS, Ubuntu.<p><a href="http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/ubuntu-to-become-the-official-os-of-china" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omgubuntu.co.uk&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;ubuntu-to-become-the-offi...</a>

Mozilla continues to support Firefox on Windows XP precisely because of XP&#x27;s huge install base in Asia. It is a struggle, though, because Microsoft would rather not spend any time or money supporting XP with Visual Studio&#x27;s toolchain.

And those users don&#x27;t care for support or security updates. Majority are not using the genuine Windows anyway and Vista&#x2F;7&#x2F;8 don&#x27;t really provide anything extra to a regular user over XP.

This is likely due to privacy; particularly in countries like China.

It has been my experience that small businesses, from book stores to car dealership, still use windows xp a lot. As soon as you put a price tag on upgrading its out of the question.

Time to upgrade to GNU&#x2F;Linux! :)