Here we are in March of 2013, and there are a slew of articles coming out on the impending demise of Windows XP, along with some statistics and guesses on what the adoption numbers are so far for Windows 7 and 8. The consensus is that over 80% of organizations have at least addressed their migration in some way. Anyway, it’s not so much the articles that are interesting, but more so the comments from readers that are usually found underneath. There seems to be discontent and confusion from some folks about the release of Windows 7 and, just a few years later, Windows 8. A lot of people are commenting that Windows XP still works for them, so they are wondering what the value of migrating would be given the significant cost of doing so. There are some good points made on the subject that are worth reading through if you have the time.

I remember that Gartner released an article early/mid 2012 and guessed that 60% of ISVs would have releases in 2013 that would no longer support Windows XP. It doesn’t seem to me that this is the case thus far, but I would bet that by mid-2014 we will see that to be true, and to a higher percentage. Some readers have made the case that their existing applications continue to function correctly on XP, so again, why upgrade? The issue then becomes a bit thorny, where you are running an unsupported app on an unsupported operating system. Again, this is probably okay (with a whole lot of caveats) but it’s not something you should consider for critical apps, or apps in at-risk deployments.