> So why isn't that included in contracts and support plans? Do banks and hospitals even care enough to ask how the supplier plans to deal with an EOL operating

> So why isn't that included in contracts and support plans? Do banks and hospitals even care enough to ask how the supplier plans to deal with an EOL operating system? Well, maybe there's more to a complex organization like a bank or hospital than software licensing. Maybe their service contracts had these exact contingencies but they've run into other problems that nobody could have predicted when XP was new, like: * That there would be a Great Recession that would wipe out a lot of firms, including banks, hospitals and medical device manufacturers. * That there would be a massive new piece of legislation that would tax medical devices heavily, thus changing the way that market works. * That the same piece of legislation would encourage hospitals to merge into each other through various incentives that were intended to limit the cost of healthcare. * That Microsoft would decide to break backward compatibility sharply compared to what they did before. Don't laugh at this one; they were business for nearly 30 years when XP came out and never broke backwards compatibility as much as they did in the past 10.