Windows 7’s biggest rival: Windows XP SP3

From: The Windows Club July 25, 2010

Thanks to sales of the new Windows 7 operating system, revenue in Microsoft’s Windows division jumped 44% to $4.55 billion from $3.17 billion a year earlier as the recent fiscal fourth quarter ending report indicated. While there is a healthy interest in Windows 7 adoption and positive enterprise migration case-studies and consumer reviews, many enterprise users plan to upgrade to XP SP3, not Windows 7.

With Windows XP SP2 reaching end of support lifecycle a few weeks back, running XP SP2 is likely to become more and more dangerous for enterprises. Microsoft will not issue any more patches, meaning that when vulnerabilities are found, it will be up to those organizations to find a work-around or be vulnerable to hackers.

A recent poll confirmed that a large number of enterprises are still running XP.
Fiberlink’s survey found that Windows 7 was running on just .33 percent of computers in their survey pool, with 15.14 percent running Windows Vista, 81.57 percent running Windows XP and 2.96 percent running Windows 2000.

An informal PC Advisor poll found that 1 in 6, XP SP2 users plans to upgrade to Windows 7, while the majority will use Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The largest proportion, however – 60.2 percent – had seen the deadline approaching (or simply accept each new service pack as it’s offered), and are already running – and plan to continue running – Windows XP SP3.

Bloggers cited migration cost and legacy applications as the main reasons for sticking with XP: “However, what is a problem is that 74% of businesses still use Windows XP, and for a lot of them, the cost of upgrading all of their machines to Windows 7 is not financially tenable. Thus, companies risk having old computers with Windows XP and new computers with Windows 7 which would fragment their network and make it impossible to streamline systems.

Since a couple of years, owing to a global meltdown in economy, any IT spending by an organization is a big bet. It gets worrisome for Microsoft when the battle is drawn with their own decade-old archaic operating system.


Source: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/window...#ixzz0ui6WIDdl

I thought that the uptake of Windows 7 in large enterprises would have been higher by now - the fact that companies are looking to move to XP SP3 really surprises me. You'd think they'd just bite the bullet and jump ship, as that OS is getting on for 10 years old! I would have thought that maybe even up to 20% of large enterprises may have been using W7 by now.

I know there's going to be a large amount of lag due to the size of the companies and the fact that even a small change can cause so much chaos... However, there are other associated problems with sticking with older software... As an example, my other half works for a large enterprise and her company laptop still uses IE6 - not exactly know for it's security. They prohibit any software changes, as you'd expect on a company laptop. I'm sure using old versions of software will cause almost as many problems as it would solve.

I was reading my now monthly letter from MS, and now BitLocker is being offered for Vista & XP SP3. How about that? There's tons of new downloads for XP, even an upgraded WMP 11. Lots of security & network tools. MS Network Monitor 3.4, I got that one myself.

For whatever reason, it appears as though the red carpet is being rolled out for XP. After all these years of being ignored, it's finally getting some REAL offerings from MS.

BTW, how would you work BitLocker in XP Pro?

Cat