11 ms·

XP is turning out to be quite the headache for Microsoft. Undoubtedly it is one of the best versions of Windows ever put out, but it's 13 years old now and not

XP is turning out to be quite the headache for Microsoft. Undoubtedly it is one of the best versions of Windows ever put out, but it's 13 years old now and not even corporate conglomerates have an excuse for not updating. Yes, the alternative to XP is only a meagre few years old and I understand it costs money to upgrade, especially a large-scale corporate network spread out over multiple locations, regions and continents. But then we need to ask ourselves this: at what point does supporting an older operating system like XP cost you more money then it would to spend the money upgrading to a later version of Windows? Surely there is a point where you're spending more money on maintaining the older version on-top of added security expenses and unexpected expenses due to loss because of an undiscovered vulnerability.

leoc 13y ago
But the XP end-of-life event has turned out to be pretty lucrative for them, with companies and government agencies opening their wallets in exchange for extended support. I wonder if they'll be enticed to shake that tree again more frequently in future.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I think this is one of those "Some money is too expensive" kind of situations, really. The drain on Microsoft's resources, and the knock-on effects of having increasingly vulnerable windows installs around, are probably worth far more, in the long run, than any amount anyone would ever pay them.
CapitalistCartr 13y ago
My CNC machines aren't so easy to update.
- jpablo 13y ago
  If you need Internet Explorer updates for those you are using them wrong.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    Do not underestimate the incompetence of someone who designed a big metal-cutting robot that runs Windows.
- DigitalSea 13y ago
  Why would you need to update your CNC machine anyway? Surely such a device is locked down and wouldn't fall prey to the kinds of vulnerabilities a corporate PC would. Presumably you're referring to the fact your CNC machine is setup to be operated remotely? The risk of someone accessing your CNC machine is probably lesser than that of someone infiltrating a corporate network and wreaking havoc on files, stealing information and credentials.
  - profsnuggles 13y ago
    I'm in the same boat where I work with XP running on our CNC machines. You can only lock them down so much and still have support from the manufacturer. It's just a standard xp box like any office pc would be running. The machines are all on the office network and are connected to the internet. It is just too valuable to keep them off the network. The foreman who is operating the machine can look at shop drawings on the manager's computer. Someone in the office draws a piece of furniture in sketchup and can export a cut list directly the the CNC machine ready to run. Run a sheet of material on the machine and it deducts it from the materials inventory. etc etc etc
    - dingaling 13y ago
      Sounds like a good use-case for a VLAN. By all means let the XP machines communicate with the inventory server and the blueprints NAS, but don't let them route to the Internet.
- batuhanicoz 13y ago
  For closed systems I think there is no need to upgrade. What is the harm of not upgrading, what is the worst thing that can happen? Of course, this is for a system that is not connected to the outside world.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Exactly, if it isn't networked then it is basically just an appliance. Just as you don't need to update the software in your microwave oven, you probably don't need to update your CNC machine. The exception to this is probably new features, such as supporting new file formats perhaps. There might be a slight concern that the CNC machine could be infected by USB-borne malware. The worse case there is probably just infecting other computers through additional USB sticks. That, or industrial sabotage, but that sort of threat was relatively unheard of until recently.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    > what is the worst thing that can happen? An operator that plugs in an infected USB drive that injects a virus that will destroy your Uranium enrichment facility? Air gaps are not what they used to be.
    - Crito 13y ago
      The USB drive was presumably infected on a computer that is or could be up to date though, indicating the strong possibility that even if the CNC machine were or could have been up to date, it would still be vulnerable.
  - graycat 13y ago
    What if you get a head crash on a boot drive? Can you reinstall from the original DVD? Maybe yes, but will the authentication code process, which needs a Microsoft server over the Internet, still work? What about getting the XP updates from the data of the DVD you have to the last XP updates? Are those still available? Can you get actual copies of the updates you can apply later without Internet access? One solution is to backup XP with NTBACKUP. Ever done that? Did you ever try to restore from such a backup? Did it work? My guess is no on all of these. I do XP backups with NTBACKUP occasionally, and have successfully restored from such a backup, but that was not easy -- there was some severe mud wrestling involved. Indeed, the backup I had was useless. How to make a backup using NTBACKUP that will restore? There are deep, dark secrets there!
GauntletWizard 13y ago
XP is 13 years old, but a viable alternative is only 5 years old; Windows 7 only came out in 2009. For many industries, replacements are measured in decades.
- jpablo 13y ago
  And I think Microsoft actually stopped selling Windows XP one year later, in October 2010.
  - higherpurpose 13y ago
    They were going to stop selling it much earlier, but they became terrified about Linux getting a foothold in netbooks, which at the time were starting to become quite popular.
- lelandriordan 13y ago
  OSX v10.1 came out around the same time and nobody seems to say the same thing about Apple which dropped support years ago. Ubuntu is used by tons of huge corporations and its LTS versions are only supported for 5 years yet nobody blames Canonical. Yes XP runs enterprise but 13 years is more than reasonable to stop support. Its not like MS suddenly dropped this on these companies either, they gave years of warning to them but the companies didn't listen and now blame MS. And if these huge companies are planning their IT infrastructure decades at a time, in an OS industry that is only around 30 or so years old, they need to rethink their strategy and hire a new CTO.
grecy 13y ago
I work at a telco. We just upgraded to Win 7 last week, and even then, more that 40% of machines are still not done, and likely won't be until late in the 3rd quarter. "Do it as late as possible" is the motto when upgrading your machines doesn't earn more income.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Large bank here. our Win7 upgrade is mostly done, but still ongoing.
- hippich 13y ago
  upgrade to Win7 which is already 5 years old...
  - dba7dba 13y ago
    You don't let your friend upgrade to Win8.
  - grecy 12y ago
    You'd be shocked how not-cutting-edge telcos are. We are an ISP for tens of thousands of customers, it's all running on XP/very old tech/hardware.
McGlockenshire 13y ago
> Undoubtedly it is one of the best versions of Windows ever put out It might be better to say "most successful," not "best."
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  OK, name the versions of Microsoft Windows which are better than XP.
  - pigeons 12y ago
    Windows 2000. Faster in every way I could come up with, particularly local file and SMB network access, and not crippled to not support raw sockets like XPSP2 is.
cletus 13y ago
> Undoubtedly it is one of the best versions of Windows ever put out I agree with this. XP was really the first version of Windows that came from the NT/2000 line (rather than the Win95/98 line) that was consumer-friendly. It's hardware requirements were (and are) pretty meager. I know I only upgraded once Windows 7 came out and it became apparent that (unlike Vista) it didn't completely suck. > at what point does supporting an older operating system like XP cost you more money then it would to spend the money upgrading to a later version of Windows? Going back to the 90s, it used to be that a new computer was essentially useless within about 3 years, such was the thirst for more power, memory and storage. But something happened about 5-10 years ago. Ever since then, pretty much any computer you can buy is "enough" for most users, particularly corporate users (which largely comes down to running a browser and MS Office). Microsoft became successful in an era where they could rely on increasing market size and churn to get rid of their old versions. Not so any more. Some will say "just spend the money and upgrade" but think about it this way: upgrading to Win7 will mean not only buying licenses but in many cases new computers. What if those computers don't actually offer any significant cost savings or improved capabilities for most workers? Think of a hospital that could spend $X million upgrading all their PCs or they could spend that money on an MRI machine or something else which saves lives. In comparison, a computer upgrade can be hard to justify. One of the reasons I switched to Chrome was for the automatic updates. It's also why I switched all my family members. No one wants to manually run updates. No one even wants the Firefox version of "Install update now?" when you start it (by virtue of you starting Firefox means you want to do something other than wait for it do stuff). Microsoft needs to integrate the philosophy of continual transparent updates. Unfortunately they're addicted to the revenue of new license sales. Just recently I looked into buying Photoshop. It's kind of a must-have for digital photography but it's really expensive (for personal use). I discovered that last year Adobe had switched from a license model to a subscription model. Some complained about this. Adobe was famous for doing things like not updating the RAW converter for previous versions of Photoshop to force you to upgrade. Thing is, their subscription is as little as $10/month. Normally these companies want to recoup the purchase cost in <12 months or something similarly unreasonable. I'm perfectly happy to pay $10/month for Photoshop. (Some) consumers are willing to pay a service fee of $15/month for TiVo. That's after purchasing the hardware and before paying for any actual content. Why isn't the market just as willing to pay a similar price for something that's meant to protect your private information, credentials photos, identity and financial data? To me, this is the real power of, say, ChromeOS. Many people only need a Web browser (particularly at work) and don't want to have to spend the time, effort and money to manage their corporate deployment. And of course MS aren't doing themselves any favours with the clusterfk that is Windows 8...
fancyketchup 13y ago
> at what point does supporting an older operating system like XP cost you more money then it would to spend the money upgrading to a later version of Windows? Well... when expensive capital equipment runs XP, that point is essentially "never." For example: Old versions of LabVIEW run on XP, but not 7. A license for one desktop runs $10-50k, depending on options. Lots of sciencey equipment requires software that only runs on XP. Want to upgrade to 7? Ok, here, buy a new $100k laser / $20k UV-vis-IR spectrometer / $10k multi-channel scaler / $10k oscilloscope / whatever. Another user mentioned his CNC machine (those aren't cheap). I mean, you can do that, but $10k buys you a lot of extended support (which is curiously unavailable to everyone who isn't a big business). I'm sure most university labs would jump at the chance to pay a few hundred dollars per machine to support instruments incompatible with 7.
- crygin 13y ago
  Seriously. A few years ago (2010ish) I was roped into helping out with a microprobe array that would have cost about $150k to replace, whose controller software would only run on Windows 95... not OSR2, meaning that USB wouldn't even work (we used ZIP disks to move sequence files on and off of it). The fellow in charge of the thing would grab systems being surplussed from elsewhere in the department that might run Win95 and clone to their drives... when I left he had 4-5 spares in a closet for the day the current controller died. EDIT: And we did attempt to virtualize it, but at least at the time were unable to do so successfully (timing issues, I think).
- yuhong 13y ago
  I don't think custom support is that cheap. There is typically a floor of at least $100k for Custom Support Standard.
  - fancyketchup 13y ago
    It's not. But from what I've heard, it's much less than that per seat. I'm saying that the PIs of most university labs would gladly pay several times the retail price of XP just to be able to continue having support for multi-thousand-dollar instruments. But I think this nitpicking over a relatively minor point--the important part is that upgrading from XP to 7 costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per computer for some people. Edit: In case you were referring to the sentence "$10k buys a lot of...," I can see how my intent was unclear (and I was sort of talking about both small and large labs at the same time). My understanding was that there is a minimum buy-in for extended support (something like $100k per year), but that such a contract would cover hundreds or thousands of computers. That's on the order of $100 to $1k per PC. A medium-sized university lab might have dozens of instruments costing on the order of $10k to $100k. Now, paying $100k to support $100k worth of instruments for a year doesn't make too much sense, but paying a few hundred dollars per $10k instrument does. Even at $1k per PC per year, avoiding an instrument purchase buys a least a decade of extended support. It's just a question of getting a critical mass (or, by convincing Microsoft to open up the program to smaller organizations).

leoc 13y ago

But the XP end-of-life event has turned out to be pretty lucrative for them, with companies and government agencies opening their wallets in exchange for extended support. I wonder if they'll be enticed to shake that tree again more frequently in future.

stormbrew 13y ago
I think this is one of those "Some money is too expensive" kind of situations, really. The drain on Microsoft's resources, and the knock-on effects of having increasingly vulnerable windows installs around, are probably worth far more, in the long run, than any amount anyone would ever pay them.

CapitalistCartr 13y ago

My CNC machines aren't so easy to update.

jpablo 13y ago
If you need Internet Explorer updates for those you are using them wrong.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Do not underestimate the incompetence of someone who designed a big metal-cutting robot that runs Windows.
DigitalSea 13y ago
Why would you need to update your CNC machine anyway? Surely such a device is locked down and wouldn't fall prey to the kinds of vulnerabilities a corporate PC would. Presumably you're referring to the fact your CNC machine is setup to be operated remotely? The risk of someone accessing your CNC machine is probably lesser than that of someone infiltrating a corporate network and wreaking havoc on files, stealing information and credentials.
- profsnuggles 13y ago
  I'm in the same boat where I work with XP running on our CNC machines. You can only lock them down so much and still have support from the manufacturer. It's just a standard xp box like any office pc would be running. The machines are all on the office network and are connected to the internet. It is just too valuable to keep them off the network. The foreman who is operating the machine can look at shop drawings on the manager's computer. Someone in the office draws a piece of furniture in sketchup and can export a cut list directly the the CNC machine ready to run. Run a sheet of material on the machine and it deducts it from the materials inventory. etc etc etc
  - dingaling 13y ago
    Sounds like a good use-case for a VLAN. By all means let the XP machines communicate with the inventory server and the blueprints NAS, but don't let them route to the Internet.
batuhanicoz 13y ago
For closed systems I think there is no need to upgrade. What is the harm of not upgrading, what is the worst thing that can happen? Of course, this is for a system that is not connected to the outside world.
- Crito 13y ago
  Exactly, if it isn't networked then it is basically just an appliance. Just as you don't need to update the software in your microwave oven, you probably don't need to update your CNC machine. The exception to this is probably new features, such as supporting new file formats perhaps. There might be a slight concern that the CNC machine could be infected by USB-borne malware. The worse case there is probably just infecting other computers through additional USB sticks. That, or industrial sabotage, but that sort of threat was relatively unheard of until recently.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  > what is the worst thing that can happen? An operator that plugs in an infected USB drive that injects a virus that will destroy your Uranium enrichment facility? Air gaps are not what they used to be.
  - Crito 13y ago
    The USB drive was presumably infected on a computer that is or could be up to date though, indicating the strong possibility that even if the CNC machine were or could have been up to date, it would still be vulnerable.
- graycat 13y ago
  What if you get a head crash on a boot drive? Can you reinstall from the original DVD? Maybe yes, but will the authentication code process, which needs a Microsoft server over the Internet, still work? What about getting the XP updates from the data of the DVD you have to the last XP updates? Are those still available? Can you get actual copies of the updates you can apply later without Internet access? One solution is to backup XP with NTBACKUP. Ever done that? Did you ever try to restore from such a backup? Did it work? My guess is no on all of these. I do XP backups with NTBACKUP occasionally, and have successfully restored from such a backup, but that was not easy -- there was some severe mud wrestling involved. Indeed, the backup I had was useless. How to make a backup using NTBACKUP that will restore? There are deep, dark secrets there!

GauntletWizard 13y ago

XP is 13 years old, but a viable alternative is only 5 years old; Windows 7 only came out in 2009. For many industries, replacements are measured in decades.

jpablo 13y ago
And I think Microsoft actually stopped selling Windows XP one year later, in October 2010.
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  They were going to stop selling it much earlier, but they became terrified about Linux getting a foothold in netbooks, which at the time were starting to become quite popular.
lelandriordan 13y ago
OSX v10.1 came out around the same time and nobody seems to say the same thing about Apple which dropped support years ago. Ubuntu is used by tons of huge corporations and its LTS versions are only supported for 5 years yet nobody blames Canonical. Yes XP runs enterprise but 13 years is more than reasonable to stop support. Its not like MS suddenly dropped this on these companies either, they gave years of warning to them but the companies didn't listen and now blame MS. And if these huge companies are planning their IT infrastructure decades at a time, in an OS industry that is only around 30 or so years old, they need to rethink their strategy and hire a new CTO.

grecy 13y ago

I work at a telco. We just upgraded to Win 7 last week, and even then, more that 40% of machines are still not done, and likely won't be until late in the 3rd quarter. "Do it as late as possible" is the motto when upgrading your machines doesn't earn more income.

chris_mahan 13y ago
Large bank here. our Win7 upgrade is mostly done, but still ongoing.
hippich 13y ago
upgrade to Win7 which is already 5 years old...
- dba7dba 13y ago
  You don't let your friend upgrade to Win8.
- grecy 12y ago
  You'd be shocked how not-cutting-edge telcos are. We are an ISP for tens of thousands of customers, it's all running on XP/very old tech/hardware.

McGlockenshire 13y ago

> Undoubtedly it is one of the best versions of Windows ever put out It might be better to say "most successful," not "best."

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
OK, name the versions of Microsoft Windows which are better than XP.
- pigeons 12y ago
  Windows 2000. Faster in every way I could come up with, particularly local file and SMB network access, and not crippled to not support raw sockets like XPSP2 is.

cletus 13y ago

> Undoubtedly it is one of the best versions of Windows ever put out I agree with this. XP was really the first version of Windows that came from the NT/2000 line (rather than the Win95/98 line) that was consumer-friendly. It's hardware requirements were (and are) pretty meager. I know I only upgraded once Windows 7 came out and it became apparent that (unlike Vista) it didn't completely suck. > at what point does supporting an older operating system like XP cost you more money then it would to spend the money upgrading to a later version of Windows? Going back to the 90s, it used to be that a new computer was essentially useless within about 3 years, such was the thirst for more power, memory and storage. But something happened about 5-10 years ago. Ever since then, pretty much any computer you can buy is "enough" for most users, particularly corporate users (which largely comes down to running a browser and MS Office). Microsoft became successful in an era where they could rely on increasing market size and churn to get rid of their old versions. Not so any more. Some will say "just spend the money and upgrade" but think about it this way: upgrading to Win7 will mean not only buying licenses but in many cases new computers. What if those computers don't actually offer any significant cost savings or improved capabilities for most workers? Think of a hospital that could spend $X million upgrading all their PCs or they could spend that money on an MRI machine or something else which saves lives. In comparison, a computer upgrade can be hard to justify. One of the reasons I switched to Chrome was for the automatic updates. It's also why I switched all my family members. No one wants to manually run updates. No one even wants the Firefox version of "Install update now?" when you start it (by virtue of you starting Firefox means you want to do something other than wait for it do stuff). Microsoft needs to integrate the philosophy of continual transparent updates. Unfortunately they're addicted to the revenue of new license sales. Just recently I looked into buying Photoshop. It's kind of a must-have for digital photography but it's really expensive (for personal use). I discovered that last year Adobe had switched from a license model to a subscription model. Some complained about this. Adobe was famous for doing things like not updating the RAW converter for previous versions of Photoshop to force you to upgrade. Thing is, their subscription is as little as $10/month. Normally these companies want to recoup the purchase cost in <12 months or something similarly unreasonable. I'm perfectly happy to pay $10/month for Photoshop. (Some) consumers are willing to pay a service fee of $15/month for TiVo. That's after purchasing the hardware and before paying for any actual content. Why isn't the market just as willing to pay a similar price for something that's meant to protect your private information, credentials photos, identity and financial data? To me, this is the real power of, say, ChromeOS. Many people only need a Web browser (particularly at work) and don't want to have to spend the time, effort and money to manage their corporate deployment. And of course MS aren't doing themselves any favours with the clusterfk that is Windows 8...

fancyketchup 13y ago

> at what point does supporting an older operating system like XP cost you more money then it would to spend the money upgrading to a later version of Windows? Well... when expensive capital equipment runs XP, that point is essentially "never." For example: Old versions of LabVIEW run on XP, but not 7. A license for one desktop runs $10-50k, depending on options. Lots of sciencey equipment requires software that only runs on XP. Want to upgrade to 7? Ok, here, buy a new $100k laser / $20k UV-vis-IR spectrometer / $10k multi-channel scaler / $10k oscilloscope / whatever. Another user mentioned his CNC machine (those aren't cheap). I mean, you can do that, but $10k buys you a lot of extended support (which is curiously unavailable to everyone who isn't a big business). I'm sure most university labs would jump at the chance to pay a few hundred dollars per machine to support instruments incompatible with 7.

crygin 13y ago
Seriously. A few years ago (2010ish) I was roped into helping out with a microprobe array that would have cost about $150k to replace, whose controller software would only run on Windows 95... not OSR2, meaning that USB wouldn't even work (we used ZIP disks to move sequence files on and off of it). The fellow in charge of the thing would grab systems being surplussed from elsewhere in the department that might run Win95 and clone to their drives... when I left he had 4-5 spares in a closet for the day the current controller died. EDIT: And we did attempt to virtualize it, but at least at the time were unable to do so successfully (timing issues, I think).
yuhong 13y ago
I don't think custom support is that cheap. There is typically a floor of at least $100k for Custom Support Standard.
- fancyketchup 13y ago
  It's not. But from what I've heard, it's much less than that per seat. I'm saying that the PIs of most university labs would gladly pay several times the retail price of XP just to be able to continue having support for multi-thousand-dollar instruments. But I think this nitpicking over a relatively minor point--the important part is that upgrading from XP to 7 costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per computer for some people. Edit: In case you were referring to the sentence "$10k buys a lot of...," I can see how my intent was unclear (and I was sort of talking about both small and large labs at the same time). My understanding was that there is a minimum buy-in for extended support (something like $100k per year), but that such a contract would cover hundreds or thousands of computers. That's on the order of $100 to $1k per PC. A medium-sized university lab might have dozens of instruments costing on the order of $10k to $100k. Now, paying $100k to support $100k worth of instruments for a year doesn't make too much sense, but paying a few hundred dollars per $10k instrument does. Even at $1k per PC per year, avoiding an instrument purchase buys a least a decade of extended support. It's just a question of getting a critical mass (or, by convincing Microsoft to open up the program to smaller organizations).