Yeah, but is it really fair to characterize those as watershed moments? I mean, every piece of software is going to stop receiving updates or be dropped, right? With Classic -> OS X and PowerPC -> Intel, I think it’s fair to say that Apple weaned customers/developers slowly enough that they mitigated them being watershed moments and turned them into “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” moments. As far as I know (and I might be wrong), Apple dropped Classic and Rosetta not so much because they had to from an engineering standpoint but more because they felt the time was right, which were both after lengthy transition periods.
OS X was released in March of 2001, but Apple continued to release updates to OS 9 until December 2001. And you could still run OS 9 in the Classic Environment through 10.4, some 6 years later.
Rosetta was available for 3 major OS versions, allowing customers/developers 5 years of the blended PowerPC/Intel lifestyle while still using the latest system software.
As for current updates, this page shows that Apple is still offering OS X security updates going back 3 OS versions, about 3 years.
What exactly does your product do? If it needs to talk to arbitrary webservers not under your control, you could perhaps do a benevolent Man In The Middle attack where you proxy the client requests through one of your servers before it gets to the destination server.
So it’d be like this:
client (tls 1.1 or ssh) ↔ your server ↔ destination server (tls > 1.1)
You could even charge a “compatibility fee” if you want, to compel users to just upgrade their XP installation instead.
Or does it even need a client app? What if you just wrote something in the cloud, so they just need a recent browser instead of worrying about the whole client-side stack?
Unfortunately there is a great deal of security required of the software, both perceived and real, and what you suggest would compromise it, making it unacceptable both to users and to the servers to which the users connect… Nether party wants us to see what is being sent/received, and neither do we want that burden.
We decided we’re going to give up on XP users who don’t upgrade. We will put up a message to them when they run our stuff that explains to them why it wouldn’t work on XP.
But Microsoft is still fixing vulnerabilities, and will continue to do so into at least 2017. They just aren’t making them available via Windows Update to users who aren’t paying them extra.
Which does not detract from the original poster’s point, BTW.
Are these 15% of your users paying you any kind of yearly support fee? Because otherwise I’d tell them to update OS. I also run a software business, we still have customers using old versions of OS X and FCP 7 (now 6 years obsolete), and we generally find if they won’t update their OS, they’re not likely to buy anything new from us either. So they’re not bringing in any revenue for us, and we just tell them to update, so far we haven’t had any backlash from that.
According to the wiki on windows XP: “On March 8, 2014, Microsoft deployed an update for XP that, on the 8th of each month, displays a pop-up notification to remind users about the end of support—these notifications may be disabled by the user.”
Seriously if you are ever going to draw a line in the sand and tell your users to update, seems like you have the perfect excuse now.
According to the wiki on windows XP: “On March 8, 2014, Microsoft deployed an update for XP that, on the 8th of each month, displays a pop-up notification to remind users about the end of support—these notifications may be disabled by the user.”.
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And yet, about a month ago, powered up my XP to check the name of a forgotten program that I once used, and when I shut it down, I had the message, “installing update #1 of 1, please do not unplug your computer. it will turn itself off when done.” (I don’t remember the exact words.) And a few months before that, there was a series of several updates.
And yet, about a month ago, powered up my XP to check the name of a forgotten program that I once used, and when I shut it down, I had the message, “installing update #1 of 1, please do not unplug your computer. it will turn itself off when done.” (I don’t remember the exact words.) And a few months before that, there was a series of several updates.
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XP will still update with any patches released before the end of support. there are no further patches/updates after April 2014.
Of your customers who have been unwilling to upgrade from XP yet, I wonder how many of them are also unwilling to change browsers?
I know that them changing browsers won’t directly solve your product support problem.
I’m thinking that if they’re such trogs that they’re still on XP today, they may in fact get a pretty strong impetus to upgrade OSes when they discover that IE on XP is rapidly becoming no longer https capable anywhere, and their worldview or their corporate security policy also won’t admit of Firefox or Chrome in lieu of IE.
Regardless of reason, them moving on to Win7 or later at least opens the door to you fixing your issue.
Hah, you have a long way to go to outstrip the IT incompetence of UK government.
Having been well aware that support was going to be withdrawn from XP for a number of years, UK national agencies are still using it, and will do so for quite some time.
The problem partly stems from extremely poor IT decisions made during the 1990’s. Custom software was commissioned that would only run on XP and on IE 5. With a bit of patching they can run up to IE 8 so they can still run their browser based custom software.
This is not cheap little software that the UK government can walk away from, we are talking many bi££ions here.
It really was obvious that using certain javascript software for custom applications for browser based applications was stupid, but the civil servants who have the seniority to spend that sort of money are also incompetent to make those evaluations.
The staff who are competent to make those evaluations, were not senior enough to prevent these extremely serious and costly errors.
I reckon we in the UK have completely wasted at least £20 billion in the last two decades, and I would not be in the slightest surprised to find that figure was double and perhaps four times that amount, the sad thing is, I doubt that anyone who knows about UK government IT projects would be surprised either.
So now we have many tens of thousands of terminals that are using emulators to pretend they are XP, so that they can still run this custom software - some of which is absolutely critical to the operation of certain agencies.
The result is that it is very slow, networks are struggling, it makes simple tasks difficult, and if you add maybe a second for each and every action that requires an entry input, then you can begin to imagine why the impact of staffing cutbacks has been so detrimental to the services that these agencies provide.
As a measure of how huge this problem is, just remember that our current austerity shortfall is significantly less than the cost of all the UK government IT fuck ups, and it ain’t over yet.
Why are these decision makers not in prison for fraud?
The problems you’re describing are not unique to the UK government or only to governments. I’ve heard many stories about failed or overbudget IT initiatives within the US government (e.g., the computer systems used by the Veterans Administration, the interoperability of the VA and the DoD’s health systems, the FBI computer systems, the Navy computer systems, the NextGen air traffic control system, etc). And the same things occur in private enterprises, but you usually don’t hear about those. I’m only familiar with the fiascoes at the companies where I’ve worked. IT systems like these are complex and some problems don’t crop up until the project is well under way. And then they take so long that some aspects are obsolete by the time they are deployed.
I don’t understand this. Yes, Windows 8 was quite foreign from the traditional Windows experience, but Windows 7 wasn’t really very different at all. If you’re used to XP, Windows 7 really wasn’t all that much different. I think even someone who has been using XP for a decade can adjust in a day or two.
The big thing was the Start Button went away in Windows 8. It was such an issue that it was brought back in 8.1, but even then, it still brough up the metro UI. The new Windows 10 button takes a reasonable middle ground by bringing up a traditional start menu alongside the metro live tiles. It fixes my biggest complaint with Windows 8 and brings back all the functionality I missed from Windows 7.
I haven’t checked games yet, but if you really want hearts, you can probably get a free app of it.
I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to go to Windows 10 right away. I mostly did it because I hated Windows 8. But if your concern is about waiting for it to be patched and have its functionality fixed, then wait on Windows 10 and go to Windows 7 for now. Windows 7 is definitely better than XP in every way, and you still get a year to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, so you can wait for the patches and upgrade to 10 later.
Frankly, I have to agree with this. I completely understand not being on the latest version, particularly if it has a lot of negative reviews. So, for instance, I understand not going to Vista from XP. I even understand waiting on 7 for a while, waiting for patches or issues to show up. But XP is now n-4. When you’re running software that old, problems creep up.
As an example, a recent consulting job I was doing was updating some accounting software for a small company. They hadn’t bothered to update it since it was written because it still worked, until they upgraded to 64-bit systems. Sure, the stuff worked fine going from Windows 2000 to XP to Vista to Windows 7 32-bit, so the issues weren’t immediate, but what could have been a few small updates along the way became a monumental task. Some of the custom libraries in the software were from companies that went out of business over 10 years ago, and the support had been bought up by another company, but that went out so long ago that no one had any expertise on it. If it had been upgraded along the way, these issues would have arisen while there was still vendor support. Instead, I’m stuck trying to figure out how to mimic functionality of libraries in software I can only run on an ancient machine without the proper tools.
Similarly, at my last job, which was supporting a government contract, they had a few XP machines because they also had software that hadn’t been updated in over 20 years (it was developed for Windows NT 3.51, to give you an idea just how old it is). Yes, they’re still getting XP patches, but it’s costing them an ungodly amount for the patching, and now they have to pay the developers extra to rush out the fix. Even though the cost of the patches and the development easily justifies why they should have updated it at least a couple times, there’s other concerns, that make the fact that it’s on XP a big problem. For instance, say you have 60,000 systems and want to make a change to the network infrastructure or domain that will improve functionality or security (as they did), but because there’s 4 systems still running XP and it’s incompatible. It was literally dragging down everyone else from modernization.
So, yeah, if you’re on XP because you’re lazy or cheap, you’re probably causing yourself a great deal more effort and cost in the long run by delaying the upgrade as long as possible. By all means, wait on Windows 10 for a while, I don’t blame anyone that puts that off for a few months or even a year. But I just can’t fathom a reason why anyone wouldn’t at least be on Windows 7.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, then. There were two scenarios that I thought of: One: XP users can continue using the older version, as long as they aren’t accessing TLS 1.2 servers. If there are any automatic updates, those would stop. Two: the program would stop working entirely, as they are accessing servers that will have to be upgraded to TLS 1.2.
In case 1, I would think you would probably want to warn them without them downloading an entire update. In case 2, I would think you’d want to give them warning ahead of time so they have time to upgrade.
It sounded like all you were going to do was add a popup when you ran the new version (or tried to install it), saying that it won’t work on XP. But that would be too late.
It’s 2. Everyone is turning off TLS1.2. We noticed it because our host company farm did that for our server, but I looked/asked around and by this time next year, it will be everyone. For now, we moved servers to one that still supports TLS1.0, but that’s temporary. Our app connects to our servers for some registration info (which is how we noticed) but its functionality requires it also to connect to a lot of external encrypted servers that are not under our control at all.