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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

I sell a Windows application targeted toward business users. 57% of my site's visitors are still running XP. Of those who purchase, 50% are XP, 40% are Win 7, and 10% are Vista users. So forgive me for not getting excited about changes to any upcoming version of Windows because until the folks in Redmond design an OS that businesses are interested in, it's mostly moot.

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As long as xp still works, it's impossible for microsoft to design an OS that businesses are interested in. migrating a large business to a new OS is a huge endeavour, and as long as there's any way to get away with not doing it, businesses are going to stick with XP.

the only way to get people off XP is to start writing applications that don't support XP.

I think cost is also a huge factor. But I would be interested to hear from some IT directors.

Right now volume licenses for Windows 7 just aren't that appealing cost-wise, especially when you consider that XP does still work. Home users have a similar dilemma: they can continue to use Windows XP for browsing the web and playing Farmville or they can spend $120 on a neutered Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade.

That's too much money for what is perceived to not be that much better. I think you'd see greater, faster adoption with a lower cost and one version (just Windows 8, not Windows 8 Starter, Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate) that has volume licensing for businesses.

I've only ever worked in a SMB contracting environment, so i can't speak for buying really large volumes, but in my experience it's not windows itself that is the big cost. it's the cost of man-hours to get everybody transferred over, the cost of training people on a new OS, and the cost of upgrading all the ancient tertiary systems that were built for 95 and somebody hacked into being compatible with XP.

The thing that kills me is that XP is basically 10 years old now. It still "adds a new device" every time i plug in a usb key.

It does that because the alternative is even worse: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/10/25504...

Why should this change? Microsoft has invested billions in Vista and Windows 7. It's time to upgrade. Supporting all the legacy costs Microsoft money that can be better spent on future enhancements.

    Microsoft has invested billions in Vista and Windows 7.
    It's time to upgrade

Non-sequiter.

You can buy support for legacy versions of VMS, Unix and OS/2.

    Supporting all the legacy costs Microsoft money that
    can be better spent on future enhancements.

It would be definitely be cost-effective to sell Windows XP support.

The reason for withdrawing XP support are strategic, not cost-oriented (nor customer-oriented!!)

Technically that's the fault of the hardware vendor for not including a valid serial # in the device's EEPROM. Did they change the behavior in later Windows versions?

no, they didn't. vista and 7 still have exactly the same behaviour as XP for initializing a new device, they just do a better job of hiding it from the users.

The issue I've seen for large businesses is that there is a lot of enterprise software that isn't supported on Win 7 yet.

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