I can’t quite work out whether your argument is that XP is too shit to use, or too valuable to throw away.
it’s a product that was still sold 3 years ago and should be supported.
You think the people who can’t spend $150 for a used system on craigslist or $300 for a new low-market Dell are going to spend $30-$50/year on a support contract? I doubt it. And there’s already a solution for people who have old hardware and aren’t willing to spend money to upgrade: Linux.
You can certainly argue that it’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep supporting XP. The problem is: Microsoft doesn’t agree with you, and it’s their decision to make. A decision that they made over ten years ago, publicly, and have generally not wavered from very much.
Engineering, software or otherwise, is all about tradeoffs. You can get a certain feature, but you have to give up certain other things. Microsoft made decisions back in the mid-90s about what tradeoffs they would make. Some of them were good ideas at the time, but no longer are. Some of them were bad ideas at the time, but were either necessary given previous decisions, or they didn’t realize it for a while. At some point, in order to move forward, you have to give up on keeping past mistakes running. Obviously, there’s a balance between moving too slowly (and letting yourself get mired in past mistakes) and moving too quickly (and people getting angry that they can’t use their old products). And Microsoft thought long and hard about that balance and decided that they’d provide 10 years of support. Or maybe they got a monkey to throw darts at a calendar. I don’t know. But 10 years is a long time in software.
General computing machines connected to the internet are sufficiently different than cars or washing machines that it’s hard to analogize. An old model of car or washing machine doesn’t require constant vigilance and quick fixes to keep someone from taking them all over with a rogue bit of code. If Ford had to spend dozens of man-years of work every month to stave off the possibility of, say, every 1990 Taurus exploding, they’d have a very different product lifetime policy.
No reason you have to throw them away. You can install another OS and the hardware will work just fine.
Any XP machine is likely running a little slow nowadays due to the fact that it is only powerful enough to run XP. Regardless of your feelings about Microsoft, they can’t make the rest of the tech world stop doing what they’re doing.
But what I want to know is how XP PCs exist out there in the business/government world and should have been upgraded years ago due to hardware failures or the simple march of time. I have no doubt that a ton of those 500 million machines are still running XP because the money managers at these businesses just failed to buy new PCs because they didn’t have to. They still don’t have to, but now they can wail that it’s all Microsoft’s fault.
Not a windows OS. I had older software that wouldn’t run under 7. I had to upgrade the software which almost doubled the price of the computer.
I do sympathize with you. I’ve been in the same situation myself. It sucks.
But, I keep coming back to the fact that I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Microsoft to keep supporting, in perpetuity, a given product. And they were up-front about their plans ten years ago.
I struggle to believe that a computer bought in 2010 won’t run Windows 7 or 8.
Anyone who bought an XP machine then should have known that Microsoft were only planning to support it for another two years, and planned accordingly. They’ve already prolonged that support, so there’s no excuse for not having upgrade plans.
really? did they include a sticker on the computer that said it would be obsolete in 3 years? Why should a consumer know this?
Because it was roughly 9 years old at that point? I mean, XP was the standard OS for computers when I was in high school. It’s not crazy to think that 3 years later it might be a little long in the tooth.
So . . . I should think about abandoning my desktop with Win3.1 some time soon?
They should do their research before purchasing, like with anything else. Hell, I bought a water filter jug for a few pounds the other day, and I spent a few minutes Googling to see if it was actually worth it, and if the filters last as long as advertised, stuff like that. And that’s for something that’ll cost a couple of quid a month. I can’t imagine spending hundreds of pounds on something without knowing what it was, and frankly people who do that deserve what they get.
Microsoft have provided 14 years of free support for XP, that’s more than I can think of for almost anything else you could purchase.
Missed the edit window:
Just kidding. I’m still not thrilled about the idea of my technology somehow becoming unusable for any reason other than the physical deterioration of the components as they age.
BUT. It appears that the people who run things on this planet have gotten together and decided to NOT let me make the rules about how things will be. Those bastards.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, is there a free online utility I can run that will analyze my hardware and tell me which OSs will run on it? Thanks. 
OK. It’s not going to happen though, so now what?
Because any consumer that purposely searched out an XP machine in 2010 knew what they were getting into. They were low-power netbooks that made up 19% of all netbook sales in 2010. Not PC sales, tiny netbook sales.
“MS Should Support it Until No Defects”
The counter to this is that perfect software is expensive, the software is sold at it’s price due to some shortcuts. So I don’t think this argument for MS support is defendable.
“XP in 2010, Consumer Should Have Known”
This is a ridiculous point of view.
Most consumers don’t even know what XP is and rightfully have a basic notion that something sold in 2010 is still “good” without having to investigate. If a company screws them then they have a legit beef and a side effect is that the company may lose sales in the future.
2014 isn’t too bad (based on 2010), although 2015 “feels” a little more appropriate.
If they don’t know what OS they’re using, they shouldn’t be buying a computer. It’s the equivalent of buying a car and not knowing what fuel it takes, it’s that basic.
There really should be a license required to access the internet…
Did these purchasers not get Windows XP? In what way were they sold faulty goods? No one told them to expect MS to support and patch their OS for years after the sell date.
I agree. The person who bought an XP computer in 2010 should be angry at the company they bought it from for selling a shitty product. But that company is not Microsoft, which stopped selling the OS in 2008 (it let others sell it in some cases for longer). Microsoft deserves some of the blame for letting it happen, but they didn’t have a great alternative.
The thing is: People complained when XP stopped being sold, too.
Microsoft as and is in a pretty tough market position, with both Google and Apple squeezing out OS sales as complementary products to services and hardware (respectively). Microsoft had the options of
- Stop selling the old OS, which means that they pretty much lose the low end of the market to Google.
- Sell the new OS for a cheaper price. They keep market share (in a slowly dying market), but take a huge hit to their profit margin.
- Keep selling the old OS in some cases. Deal with the fallout later.
They went with 3, and now it’s time to deal with the fallout. Computers are complicated. The computer industry is more complicated still. It’s hard to make the right choice as a producer or a consumer, and you often end up having to live with past choices longer than you’d like.
Sorry, but no. Microsoft let XP be sold longer than originally planned because Microsoft thought selling XP longer than originally planned was in their own best interest. They weren’t acting like that guy in Les Miserables. “You forgot to take this also, would you leave the best behind?”
The argument that MS themselves extended how long it was sold and should therefore support it longer too is pretty simple, even if you disagree with it.
Wait, are people saying that the consumers who didn’t have a clue about the future roadmap of the thing they were buying did have a clear expectation of updates for some period longer than was actually the case? That doesn’t make sense to me.