There’s news from KACE that M$’s customers are clinging tenaciously to XP with many even planning to stick with XP after 2014… That’s deadly for a monopoly that relies on businesses staying on the Wintel treadmill. The message is clear. XP is enough bloat for anyone and there’s no need to disrupt IT to please M$.
The result IMHO is that when businesses finally cannot get drivers for XP for new equipment they will seek MacOS or GNU/Linux. If price matters, it will be GNU/Linux.
see KACE
“The survey included some seemingly odd results, such as the 48 percent of respondents who said they would continue to use Windows XP without support. Microsoft plans to end support for Windows XP in April 2012, which means that users will no longer receive regular security patches for the operating system. Meinhardt speculated that XP will continue to be used, but not across the organization, in such cases.
“My sense is that 48 percent will use XP in isolated areas of their business where it’s cost prohibitive to move a customer application to Win 7,” Meinhardt stated via e-mail. “This is consistent with what we saw with Win 98. It’s not that 48 percent of customers will use XP as their primary OS.”
The survey also found that alternative productivity suites have made some inroads. The most frequently used Office alternative was OpenOffice.org (18 percent), followed by Google Docs (10 percent).”
28% not using Office??? _sarcasm_How can they possibly manage?_/sarcasm_
17451
12756
206
3
2
23896 
11852 
11703 
4626 
4259 
1641 
198 
14 
2 
0 
0 
0 
I work with several small businesses in my area. All are still using WinXP. None have expressed any interest in moving to Win7. One has a couple of users on newer laptops using Win7. Another, the owner of that business, has a Win7 laptop that hes thinks is a “piece of s**t” so he obviously has no interest in moving to Win7 office wide. They are all now working but all went through quite a period of futzing with them to get them working at the same level of productivity as they were with WinXP. This was mostly software and driver issues with some reloading required after failed tries.
The only thing that will push these businesses off of WinXP to Win7 is if their main software provider forces them to. All have basically the same situation. They are dependent upon one or two niche softwares that their business depends on. For instance one is a dental office that uses a specific dental scheduling/billing software, another a distributor that uses a invoicing/client records software and so on. If the provider of each of these products forces reliance on Win7 then the business will be required to move on to it. At this point its not happening so my business customers are working fine with WinXP.
As for moving off of WinXP to Linux, its possible but unless those software vendors start offering native Linux support there is only one way to go. For instance, one of my customers decided to use Apple/Mac as their office workstations and use WinXP in a virtual machine software for the one application that is Windows based. After I converted them over they have had very few issues with this setup. Fas less than if they had been using Windows for all desktops. The same thing could have been easily done with Linux. They just chose Apple/Mac because the office manager was already familiar with it from using it at home.
Years ago I realized that newer versions of Windows were offering nothing actually new or compelling. In true fact people could still be using Win95 since the actual environment has changed little since it was commonly in use. Email, Web browsing, documents etc all work exactly the same now as they did then. What has changed has been mostly forced obsolescence in software by companies like Microsoft to force customers to move to newer versions to sustain their obscene profit margins.
Several of these same customers are using Open Office in place of MS Office on systems where the users do not require specific features of MS Office. They have had zero problems with document formatting and exchanging documents with MS Office users. Beyond me simply alerting them to the fact that MS Office uses a .doc (.docx) file name and Open Office uses .odt as well as the same thing with Excel/Calc there has been little need to worry about how they were going to use it versus MS Office. Its a myth that there is a problem moving off of MS Office to Open Office.
So the biggest issue is not so much moving off of Windows, that is fairly easy. The biggest issue is getting the various niche software vendors moving off of it or at least not forcing their customers to move to newer versions of Windows by forcing obsolescence of existing versions of their software.
Virtualization, while not allowing one to get off of it, is proving to be very effective at grinding the WinTel upgrade treadmill to a halt. By allowing the same hardware profile to presented the guest XP, no matter how the hardware standards change, it removes upgrade pressures forced by such architectural drift for example IDE to SATA or 32- to 64- bit. The software system that is stable is now independent of hardware aging and failing. The host OS be it GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris need not be delved into too deeply, in a way really it could be treated a “superdriver” layer.
@oe
Excellent point. Drivers are not an issue as long as the virtual machine has the pseudo-devices that XP likes. For printing they can use PS or PDF and slide through with no problem. The host OS could be GNU/Linux with a filter for malware. It could work. They could keep XP forever cutting into new sales of that other OS forever… Cute. They could even connect using thin clients up to 10 in number to take care of future growth for years. No wonder M$ resisted virtualization for so long. Enough years on XP and any later version would be a jarring experience. Lose ’98/2K are just now dying off so we could see fewer new licences for business for a decade.
Thanks for the comment, oe. I usually look at virtualization as consolidation of servers/sharing the wealth but now it also looks good for working museums… Cool
“They could keep XP forever cutting into new sales of that other OS forever… Cute. ”
Its not that simple Pog. Your copy of XP has to be a full standalone license (OEM or Volume license) the copy that comes with a particulat system is licensed for that system only, and in fact in many cases is tied to the machine.
The other problem with virtualization is that you generally cant do it on the ancient hardware that you preferr, and the virtualization assists are generally left out of the chips that are used on the cheap machines that you preferr.
These issues aside virtualization is great because it is the ultimate preserver of choice. If I have a program that only works under XP I dont have to worry about keeping around an old system just to run my software. I can implement an XP virtual machine and run the software on it forever. If I want to be able to surf the web with absolute security, I can run firefox in a Linux VM on my Windows desktop.
In the end the only choice left in a world in which virtual machines are part of the equation is which OS gets to own the hardware and which plays guest.
If you prefer linux, you let linux own the hardware and run windows in the VM.
IF you prefer Windows, you let Windows own the hardware and run Linux in the VM.
And everyone wins.