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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

I think it is completely unrealistic to even think that MS would add SNI to XP anymore. 5 years ago, maybe? But now, that's ridiculous.

And I strongly disagree with the title that MS is the one holding secure web back. I'd blame the users (both corporations and personal ones) who won't upgrade, either to modern browser or a modern OS.

edit: Additionally those nice graphs are misleading. I bet other (SNI supporting) browsers have significant market share on XP too. Compare the market share of IE <9 (<20%) to XP (33%). And some of those IE8 users probably are on Vista/7.

edit2: And if we look at IE8 market share trend, it has been steadily decreasing for the past year. I feel safe to say that in a year it has decreased to a low enough percentage so that it can be ignored.

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For it to be ignored, it better be below 1% market share. Try explaining to your invesors that users least likely to understand why they can't do business with your site are unimportant. If your market is "developers"....it might be OK to ignore ie8 at 5% and explain why in some js that detects it.

However, for majority of e-commerce sites, even 1% would mean a loss in sales that would be unacceptable to many business owners I know

Source: I work in web hosting -- e-commerce mostly.

Instead of explaining that they can't do business with XP users, explain that supporting XP users incurs the additional cost of an IP. Let them decide if it's worth it.

While Windows 7 is great and all and I love it compared to XP, what does it actually give you to justify the price?

Pretty much sod all.

That's why users haven't forked out money. If it comes free with the new computers, fine. I reckon we'll be seeing it for another couple of years.

But don't blame the users, blame the utter lack of progress by MS.

>While Windows 7 is great and all and I love it compared to XP, what does it actually give you to justify the price?

SNI?

But everyone running servers is dealing with that for me. As an end user, why do I care?

"While Windows 7 is great and all and I love it compared to XP, what does it actually give you to justify the price?"

I think the UI improvements alone (desktop search, Aero Snap) are worth the price. Isn't this how Apple justifies charging for new versions of OS X? I still use XP from time to time and 7 is far and away a better experience. FWIW, I think it also provides a better experience than OS X, although, sadly, without the benefit of a POSIX layer.

"blame the utter lack of progress by MS"

It's not like MS has been sitting on their hands of late. Kinect demonstrates this. Windows 8 demonstrates this. I just don't think there's an appetite for MS progress or innovation. What people like about Windows computers isn't (and hasn't been for a long time) Windows. It's pretty hard to innovate when no one wants what you're selling.

To be fair, I don't "blame the users" for this. When MS had a tight grip on computing, they did little to make their products more compelling and they are realizing the consequences of this now: Windows' name is mud.

>I just don't think there's an appetite for MS progress or innovation. What people like about Windows computers isn't (and hasn't been for a long time) Windows. It's pretty hard to innovate when no one wants what you're selling.

Good point. There is another side in here too: many people want to keep using the old systems they have learnt, instead of new better systems. Eg the backslash of Ribbon. It's pretty hard to innovate when on one wants anything to change.

Is an "innovation" that nobody wants really innovation, or merely change-for-changes-sake?

I think that if something is better, then people will want it, steal it even. Take those un-skippable previews on some DVDs: people cite them as reasons to scrounge up pirate versions of DVDs. Oh, and how about those abominable "region codes" on DVDs? Are those "innovation" or merely a monopoly-enabled form of price fixing?

> Is an "innovation" that nobody wants really innovation, or merely change-for-changes-sake?

It's not clear, at least to me, that nobody wants Microsoft's innovations. I think it's more that they don't want them from Microsoft. Windows is a tough beast to change. The near ubiquity of the platform in the 90s and 00s means that there's a lot of people out there who "imprinted" on the Windows UI model.

It doesn't just affect Microsoft, though it may affect them disproportionately because of brand association. While OS X is a screaming success now, Apple's transition from OS 9 was anything but. It took 3 major revisions of the software before it was usable and a lot of people hated it at the time.

In contrast, Apple's introduction of iOS received a much warmer reception because there was no incumbent. Changing a major technology platform is hard.

As a counterpoint to your enthousiasm: Windows 7 does a number of things better. But I recently went back to XP for a while and was amazed about my productivity. I'm not starting apps that much so the improved start menu isn't that special. Window management hasn't changed much and I think keyboard navigation seemed easier. I would pay a small amount to downgrade.

"Window management hasn't changed much"

To be fair, I think this is true across platforms. On what platform is window management better than it was 5 years ago? Sure, Windows lacks a good way to get an overview of all open windows (such as Expose), but I honestly think Aero Snap is a killer feature for desktop use (especially because it supports the keyboard so well). When programming, I often like to have my editor and reference material side by side and Aero Snap make this literally a snap, which is great when the reference material changes frequently. Sadly, when programming, I also like to use a suite of GNU tools, which makes Windows a bit less compelling.

Although you seem to think it's gotten less good, I still think keyboard navigation remains Windows' strongest competitive advantage over OS X. It's also the only thing Windows does better than Gnome Shell which is otherwise the best desktop UI I've experienced.

I think we agree and I have to admit I under use Snap. It just doesn't come intuitive to me yet.

I primarily dislike the keyboard navigation in the 'Open File...'-dialogs. Tab is not as effective anymore since it takes more hits to change focus from the folder view to the sidebar. Furthermore, and this is nitpicking, the number of tabs needed also seems to be context depended and the number of items in the sidebar has grown.

I personally prefer StumpWM with KDE tools. I've never had a more effective keyboard experience.

Oh yeah, I totally agree that it looks great, but £100 worth of great? Maybe £5 worth of great. Or even £10.

And that's MS's problem, they've priced themselves out of their own market. The prices they charge are ridiculous and a little sad and pathetic that they think an OS, the thing that basically opens other programs, is really worth that much. I know that in reality it's much cheaper and provides more value than that. The expensive sticker price is the muppet's price, but that's the problem.

That's why users haven't forked out money. If it comes free with the new computers, fine. I reckon we'll be seeing it for another couple of years.

It's been coming free with our corporate PCs for years now, and we're still unlikely to switch any time soon.

(At least until they stop shipping security patches)

Just curious, why haven't you switched yet or have planned to switch 'anytime soon'?

Moving a few thousand PCs to a new OS means testing every application you use to make sure it's compatible, and then running a large set of rollouts to desktops.

It's very disruptive, and horribly expensive.

If at all possible, you don't do it more than once per decade.

I understand that it's expensive, but from my point of view it seems like upgrading is going to happen sooner or later, and I just don't see that many advantages in waiting for later.

If we did it every five years then it would have cost twice as much over the last decade, and we'd have ended up stuck with Vista for five years :->

Are you saying that many of those clinging to XP are planning to jump directly to 8?

8 is due out this year, XP dies in two years, so providing 8 is stable at the end of 2013, and the interface looks like it will support business productivity perfectly well, then yeah, jumping to 8 would make sense. Particularly as that way there would be longer until we have to make the next jump.

Pretty much this. It's only quite recently that many of our business apps are even officially supported on Windows 7, and even then it will involve upgrades and changes to things that are otherwise working.

If you don't need to be on the cutting edge then there's a benefit to being a little behind the times and letting others iron out the bugs first.

That's the curse for MS, there are very few legitimate reasons to upgrade, XP works great and MS offered upgrades for 10 years! I cannot think of one thing that I wish they had though, at least not on top of my head. Everything else is offered by third parties

You're right but I don't think it's a matter of money. It's convenience. Microsoft seems to be going out of their way to keep users of their older products in the dark ages. The other major OS players (Apple and Linux distros) seem to be able to upgrade users of their older products when it comes to things like SNI. I mean, unless I'm seriously misinformed it shouldn't be a big deal to offer users of XP support for SNI and generally allow them to access upgrades that are in the same kind of class (for lack of a better word) as SNI. That kind of upgrade is very different than giving users the kind of OS upgrades that bring better performance or new UI's, various little wizards to help them connect to wifi, etc. The latter type of upgrade is why an average user upgrades a system, not because of under-the-hood stuff like SNI so giving it to them when they're still such a large portion of MS users isn't going to discourage them from upgrading to Win7 or whatever new thing they come out with.

I've been able to upgrade my Mac for about four years now from Leopard to Snow Leopard to Lion without a hitch. If I were using XP I'd probably have to buy new hardware with every upgrade and that's what's stopping people. It's not the money but the inconvenience that stops people. If their XP is doing the bare minimum of what they need it for then they're not going to upgrade to Win7 even if they know about the new ways it makes their life more convenient and how much prettier it is. They don't want to transfer their old important files from one drive to another. That's scary for the average person no matter how easy Microsoft advertises it to be.

It feels like Microsoft makes decisions with a heavier focus on marketing than real technical improvements, innovations, or user experience. I mean they make a good product (it's not my cup of tea but I'm not a bigot about it) but they're still operating like they have no competition and it's really screwing with people like us who are trying to move things forward.

It's great that you've been able to upgrade from Leopard - released in 2007. Comparing that to upgrading XP is disingenuous, as Windows XP was released in 2001, which puts it in the vintage of OS X Puma.

I had a Dual G5 Power Mac from 2006. Consequently, I have not been able to upgrade that machine past Leopard. That's new hardware that had all of a single year of OS upgrades.

It's been demonstrated that you can run Windows 7 on Windows XP hardware. I know that when I upgraded from XP to 7 on a several-years-old machine when Win7 first came out, it was notably faster. I had installed the free beta, just to see, and was so surprised at how much better it was, I pre-ordered an operating system for the first time in my life.

What version of OSX can you run on a Mac from 2001?

I thought of that and you have a point. But I'd say my other point about Microsoft not really making it easy to upgrade still stands. They really don't do much to make upgrading cheap or convenient and although Apple has only been moving in the cheap/convenient direction as far as upgrades are concerned for that past few years you still can't deny that Microsoft has shown itself to be an incredibly slow-moving, stubborn company despite there finally being some real competition in recent years. Its not that Windows is somehow shitty in some way, it's just that Microsoft doesn't do as much to encourage upgrades as they could or should. And this applies mostly to the average consumer. I know you and I can get any OS to run any hardware if we really wanted to but the average person doesn't take any chances and goes with the recommendations on the box. If they could skip the box altogether and get it downloaded and installed that way I'm sure we'd see even less of XP. I'm not so sure that'll happen any time soon though.

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