The article hints at a big reason for retiring XP support, but doesn't get right at it: "After April [2014], when we release monthly security updates for suppo

The article hints at a big reason for retiring XP support, but doesn't get right at it: "After April [2014], when we release monthly security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will try and reverse engineer them to identify any vulnerabilities that also exist in Windows XP," said Tim Rains, director of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group. "If they succeed, attackers will have the capability to develop exploit code to take advantage of them." Right now, the cadence of security updates to Vista/7/8/Windows Server 2003/Windows Server 2008/Windows Server 2012 is tied to how quickly those updates can be backported and tested for Windows XP, because as soon as those patches are released for any Windows operating system, attackers can use them to create exploits for those vulnerabilities and backport those exploits to XP (which they can do faster and with fewer resources than Microsoft can backport patches, because exploits have a much smaller test suite to ensure they don't break systems, ie they don't have such a test suite at all). Continuing to support XP degrades the ability to support newer operating systems that haven't gotten an extension on their end of life, and at this point it's pretty clear that people still using XP aren't taking advantage of postponing its EOL to do anything but keep using XP. Something's got to give.