It may be hard to believe but there was a time when people looked forward to new versions of operating systems. Before Windows XP many PC operating systems were not very good. The developers of applications had to code around problems. Companies wanted their business applications to be more reliable. Over the years operating systems improved.
Before Windows XP Microsoft had two PC operating systems. One was the descendant of Windows 95 the other of Window NT. In the years that preceded Windows XP Microsoft incrementally improved the user interface on the Windows 95 side and the reliability and performance on the NT side. Windows XP was the convergence of the best of both. Before XP Microsoft released a new version of its operating system almost every year. It would be almost 6 years until a successor to XP — Windows Vista — hit the market (with a thud). Six years was an impressive accomplishment, but still XP lived on. Windows Vista was not the market success Microsoft expected. Vista introduced too many changes. The market chose to stay with XP. It would be another two years before a true successor to XP emerged in Windows 7.
Why didn’t everyone upgrade to Windows 7? They didn’t need to. Since applications provide the real value, Windows XP users had everything they needed. The applications did everything they needed and the operating system was solid. There was very little value in upgrading.
XP is now 12 years old – the same age as my son Channing — and both are a little cranky. Today Microsoft officially ended support for XP. Now what’s a loyal XP user to do? Just remember it is the applications that provide the value.
I think Microsoft hasn’t been especially smart about the way they’ve ended support for XP. It could go on for years more making good money for Redmond. Not all support is gone — did you know that? Microsoft still has to support the Government of Canada’s use of Windows XP. Governments can do things like that. And since Microsoft already has to provide this paid support to Canada, why not sell it to anyone else who wants to pay?
Here are the rules I’d set:
1) Support will be provided only to legitimately licensed workstations. Only those paying for support will get the updates, etc.
2) All supported workstations must have good security software, running all the time.
3) There will be no end-user support. Microsoft’s support will be limited to keeping XP secure. Only serious problems will be fixed. The security software will be expected to deal with most of the minor problems.
4) Microsoft should agree to provide continuing paid support for three years. When it is clear the support subscriptions will no longer provide enough revenue to sustain the operation, Microsoft should give a one year notice for the termination of the service.
I’ve heard 90 percent of the critical vulnerabilities found in Windows XP could be mitigated by removing administrator rights. There are a few applications that require administrator rights to work properly, the most significant of which is Apple’s iTunes. All popular Windows XP applications should be able to operate with only simple user rights. If this is not the case the application owner should fix the application. If iTunes is a problem for XP then Apple should fix it.
The market has changed and the needs of Microsoft customers have changed, too. Upgrades need to be easier and cheaper. We can expect people to keep their workstations for five to 10 years. By the same token future operating systems should run fine on five-year-old hardware. You should be able to plan on your operating systems lasting from five to 10 years, too. Maybe we don’t need a new version every 2 or 3 years.
Microsoft should make the cost of upgrades cheaper. Given the size of the customer base and its reluctance to upgrade, I think there is more money to be made by lowering prices and increasing demand. They are truing that in the extreme with Windows Phone.
Microsoft made mistakes with Windows Vista and Windows 8. They need to learn from those mistakes, but alas they probably won’t or there wouldn’t have even been a Windows Vista or Windows 8.
The Windows interface is the product of over 25 years of evolution. People understand it. They are comfortable with it. Imagine buying a car and finding out all the controls had been moved. That is what Microsoft did with Windows 8. Mobile devices and workstations are very different things. It may not be practical to have the same interface on both. Microsoft would be smart to get better tuned into the needs of your users and the market.
Historically the IT industry has been at its best when there is vigorous competition. The Linux community needs to do a better job of tuning into the needs of PC users. There are reasons the Linux desktop operating systems have not enjoyed the same level of success as has Windows. There are still rough spots and applications that are not available. The sooner there are solutions to these problems, the better.
Then we can stop reminiscing about the Good Old Days of Windows XP.
…or just open source XP and let other people support it for free. I wonder how many people wouldn’t bother with Linux if XP was free?
What do you think came on all those machines that are running Linux? I’ll bet 99% of Linux users have a windows license they rarely if ever use. I’m just happy to get the machine discount for all that crapware they installed on the windows partition I erased 😉
My question is: What would’ve happened if Steve Jobs had release the ‘NeXT’ OS for PC’s at $99 instead of $900 back in .. what, ’91?
-Hey.. I can edit my post… nice change!
Given how much in Windows is licensed, I wonder how functional an XP that was open-sourced would actually be?
Same goes for VB6 (which absolutely needs to be open sourced; far more so than XP): given the amount of licensed code in there from other sources, how successful could open sourcing actually be?
Kenny: because Microsoft would end up competing against its own, relatively solid, operating system. How many people would stick with free XP vs $100 Win7 or Win8, if the Apps still ran just fine? I would!
The exact same number of people that currently run Linux on the desktop today.
First of all “open source” != “free.” Second of all — and I’ve always wanted to say this: Windows is only free if your time is worthless.
Part of the attraction of using proprietary anything is that you’re paying for it to work. And when it doesn’t work, you’re paying for the vendor from whom you’re licensing it (!= owning it) to fix the problems. Microsoft has nothing to gain from open sourcing Windows. Making it free and charging for support is probably a better idea.
“Vista introduced too many changes”
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That’s being kind. 😉
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“The Linux community needs to do a better job of tuning into the needs of PC users”
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And *that’s* being hilarious. 🙂
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It’s too late for the desktop, anyway. Linux supporters would be better off throwing their effort behind Firefox OS or Ubuntu Touch, now.
The funny thing is, Linux & BSD already have taken over as the dominant OS. A report over on The Street claims that Android has 51% of the smartphone market, with iOS having 42%. There has been an operating system revolution, and *Nix won.
The question is, how does that market share translate into more than casual use.
That’s not “The Linux community,” that’s two major corporations who have co-opted Linux and BSD for their own, proprietary purposes.
> throwing their effort behind Firefox OS
Mozilla self-destructed last week, in case you did not notice.
(They did not either. They are still enjoying the explosion, sort of like Willy Coyote, but smugger. Except the troops looking at this: https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?date_end=2014-04-09&date_start=2014-03-04 )
Cringely still DOES NOT GET IT. Microsoft cannot execute. Everyone knows about all the cool features unix had 20 years ago, that Microsoft still cannot do. Come on. Their best product, xp, was 14 years ago!
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All they can do is move the icons around, or change them from icons to tiles (wow!!!), because they lost control of their own spaghetti code. They let Apple catch up. Linux is still too fragmented and rough to be much competition.
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Has nobody noticed, new windows features other than UI tweaks are nearly NON EXISTENT? This is no different than slapping a new coat of paint on an old house.
Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 are far more secure than XP, so that’s hardly a fair statement.
Windows 8 is secure because it’s so goddamn awful no-one wants to run it…
I think there’s no doubt win7 and win8 were designed in a more security-conscious manner.
On the other hand, considering that most security-holes are not there by design (but are either design- or implementation flaws), there’s something to be said for testing.
So while on one hand, win7 and 8 my be more secure, on the other XP is the more tried&tested.
Go figure.
I long ago started treating windows boxes as nothing more than a one time bootloader for Linux.
Recently I had to work behind a windows 7 box for a few days, and was simply stunned at how useless the thing was out of the box – no applications, no compilers, not even unzip, all stuff I get for free with nearly every Linux distro. The box was slow, and the web browser would hang arbitrarily for no discernable reason, ipv6 support sucked, and
So I gave up, installed linux, and installed 7 as a virtual machine for the one application I’d needed it for. Huge speedup! openoffice by default, firefox, emacs, etc. I know that I’ve lived outside the windows box for a long time, but you have to have blinders on in order to keep using windows at this point. OSX is much more usable out of the box than Windows is, and Linux more so.
XP is dead. Long live XP.
My sentiments, too 🙂
BS meter sounding.
Windows is terrible, and Internet Explorer has inexplicable usability problems, but Windows is not as bad as you say.
Unzip? Why? Ever since Windows XP, Windows Explorer has had its own built-in zip and unzip. They just open and act superficially like directories. (Behind the scenes, it sometimes unpacks zip files into a temporary directory, and Windows doesn’t reliably clean up temporary directories, so there’s that.) Windows 7 has actually decent IPv6 support; I don’t think Microsoft certifies Windows to run without IPv6 anymore.
Performance is a toss-up. Sure, in the old days, Windows had horrible performance. But now Linux systems either have mid-80’s UI, or they take the performance hit of doing all UI rendering in the program’s libraries and just use the X server as a vestigial middleman. One day Wayland will be ready for mainstream use, I’m sure. And don’t get me started on hardware drivers, especially for those nice low-power systems with the H.264 decoders.
And then most of the nice software for Linux is natively available on Windows. Even Emacs.
I wouldn’t voluntarily use Windows for a development box, but it’s not unusable.
I don’t think that Vista flopped because of too many changes introduced in the OS. I think it flopped for two reasons – User Account Control (UAC) and the huge increase in hardware requirements. And both were (I think) a direct result of the delay caused by the Trustworthy Computing memo from Gates.
UAC had users clicking every time they did something on their computers that required administrative privileges – and because MS had never cared about applications operating at the lowest possible privilege level, many, many apps were written to require admin rights to work properly. After all, that way the app worked and the coding was easier.
The hardware requirements for Vista over XP were huge. XP wanted a 233 MHz CPU and 64 MB RAM (recommended 128 MB) – but Vista’s minimums were a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM for anything except Basic (I’m a fix broken computer stuff guy and I’ve never seen a copy of Basic in my area – Canada). Practically speaking, XP machines needed 512 MB RAM to run well (I have only seen one XP computer that ran well on 256 MB RAM). BUT! Vista needed 2 GB RAM to run well!
We forget now in these days of multi-core processors and GB of RAM how much the hardware we had in our machines at that time decided how fast our boxes ran for the things that we did. Ten years ago, specs like that were in servers.
Gates’ Trustworthy Computing memo put a hold in the Windows release pipeline. I believe that meant that – in order to get Vista shipped close to a timeframe where MS could say – ‘this is a new and greater version of Windows’ – they had to ship it in a less refined state. Which meant a larger code base that required more hardware to run well. Otherwise – why would Windows 7 (which uses a lot of the Vista code) need less hardware than Vista to run well?
Let’s not forget that Vista was suposed to have all these great new features, like WinFS, that just didn’t get delivered. It continues to this day with 32 bit and 64 bit OS versions. Just kill off 32 bit intel already! Apple has had emulation for years that works fairly well, and most developers have been offering 64 bit versions anyway. Linux is very similar, with minor steps needed to install 32 bit applications on 64 bit distros. But for some reason Microsoft continues to support 2 code bases (actually 3 if you count Windows 8 on ARM devices).
Trustworthy Computing — there’s an interesting concept. Yes there have been many copyright problems with PC’s. There is usually 2 ways to deal with the problem — the carrot or the stick. The RIAA and Microsoft chose the “stick” approach by suing users and booby-trapping the operating system. It is important to observe Apple used the “carrot” approach. With the iPod and iTunes Apple came up with a better and easier way for people to buy and manage their music legally.
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As the parent of young kids during that era we had a music problem in our house. Our kids would like a song, save their money, and go buy a CD. On that CD would be the one good song and a dozen recordings of trash. Some of that trash was not age appropriate. Over those years I returned those CD’s to the store and got my kids money back. It was a bad situation for the stores. The kids couldn’t buy the single song they wanted. So they started swapping, ripping, and burning.
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Apple took the time to understand what was really going on. Microsoft did not. Apple came up with a multi-billion dollar business that worked. Microsoft came up with Vista.
I agree with the bloated requuirements part. My wife bougth an XP laptop in 2007 that worked nicely. A year later we bought a 2008 laptop with similar (or even slightly better hardware) with Vista for our daighter, that crawled. At the time I just thought it was not worthy installing Vista in any ollder machine, as they were doing fine with XP, and that I was not going to replace the older machines because we did nnot need more from them (I guess a lot of people felt that way too). I finally installen Win 7 on my wife’s 2007 laptop las week; User experience was 3.7, and it run faster than our daughter’s one when new.
I’m old enough to remember when people hated Windows XP and vowed to stay with Windows ’98 or Windows Me.
I think the online validation was a cause of a lot of animosity.
I’m not sure that’s a valid sample size. I vowed that I would never move off of Windows 2000 Professional but I think XP was the best OS product Microsoft has released before or since.
It was also the last shrink-wrapped Microsoft product I ever bought. That’s part and parcel of Microsoft’s current problem — end users are not really their customers and broad, sweeping changes are harder for them to pull off.
I don’t remember ANYONE who “wanted” WinME. I know some ignorant purchases that include WinME and, to a person they were struggling to “downgrade” to Win98se.
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And I was supporting several hundred users and double that in PCs and servers at the time.
The barmiest thing is that you can’t upgrade past XP. You have to do a clean install (existing stuff is renamed out the way) and then reinstall all your apps. People are bad enough at backups, but realistically how many do you think are capable of finding all their existing apps and reinstalling them (CDs, installation keys etc). It is significantly complicated by the Windows app model where the app files are scattered all over the place. (Mac gets it right where apps are just self contained directories.)
This lack of backwards compatibility comes from a company that exemplified it – Andy demonstrates it upgrading from the earliest Microsoft operating systems: http://rasteri.blogspot.com/2011/03/chain-of-fools-upgrading-through-every.html
Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is described at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/help/upgrading-from-windows-xp-to-windows-7 where step 2 has you losing existing installed apps and data.
The thing about XP was that, after a couple of years, it Just Worked (TM). Dad was running on it until last year, when I got him moved to Windows 7. If I’d known how difficult that would be I would’ve just gotten him a Mac Mini. The learning curve wouldn’t’ve been any steeper, and the applications that come with it are much better.
And, no, I was not going to move my 85 year old Dad to Linux. I like Linux, and have no problem running it, but I started using it when RedHat came in a box with two manuals, a CD, and a boot floppy. And the 1.9 kernel. The days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers.
Hey I’m still reminiscing about the good old days of AmigaOS – far better than the rubbish Microsoft were serving up as an OS at the time!
I’d second the comment about Vista’s problem being the botch of the security model and the horror stories that spawned, partially, but I think mostly it was the comparatively enormous hardware requirements; some may remember the utility you could run that would tell you how much extra resource you’d need to buy just to load Vista, never mind do any work. My personal experience at that cost MS a customer. My personal PC was getting a bit long in the tooth at the time and I had a big dollar hill to climb to migrate. It occurred to me that most of what I was doing on my personal machine was surfing and e-mail (naturally) and photography and music related hobbyist things. Realizing that the common wisdom was that those latter things were better done on a Mac I bought one of those instead. Within six months every PC in the house had been swapped out for a Mac and within six months of that I became one of the first people at my company to carry a MacBook Pro and not a Thinkpad. Ciao Windows!
My exact experience as well! Vista? Sorry. Hello, Apple!
Maybe I have too much of my late grandfather in me, but I never understood the necessity of keeping anything past its sell-by date, Win XP included. As an end user, it frustrated me to no end to be saddled with an aging XP environment on my work PC four years after 7 was introduced and was stable.
I really don’t care that XP was bulletproof by then. I don’t drive cars for 10 years, why would I want a 10 year-old OS running on new hardware? I don’t wear a wrist watch anymore, either, though it would be much more stable than my phone’s OS, and wouldn’t need to be recharged as often.
Now that 8.1 has been introduced, I’m ready to move on again. It has a great feature set and I think live tiles are a fresh take on the UI experience that will improve over time. It’s called progress. Something my grandfather would have understood very well.
I’m still using it at work, who are in the midst of a windows 7 upgrade. Might just be muscle memory but I know where everything is, moving to windows 7 or 8 is just a pain and gains me nothing, and forget about using help, this has got worse and worse over the years. Thank god for google.
We use XP at work in a computer connected to an expensive piece of specialized equipment, which it drives. I have been told that this is done because they didn’t think it was worth it to write a driver for a newer version of Windows.
Is this really true – that we have to run XP? I dunno – but this piece of equipment is cantankerous enough (hours and hours of site visits by the vendor to finally get it running stably) that I think no one wants to run the risk of upsetting it.
Anyway, perhaps I was just misinformed re: the requirement for XP, but in any case, we’ll continue running XP until IS (or the vendor) wants to take on the project of upgrading the workstations it’s connected to. (and yes, it’s on the network)
Bob said “applications provide the real value” and that’s a point missed by so many. It’s what you do with the computer, not the OS which only provides an interface from the application to hardware.
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I have a number of engineering applications which are old. But they do exactly what I need them to do. The notebook it’s on is still superb with a high resolution screen. Replacement cost is high. But it’s not fast enough to run Windows 7 or 8. My thoughts were exactly the same as Bob – a subscription for updates to my XP install would keep me happy if it was at the right price.
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I resisted Vista. In fact I got a computer for my mum and it had Vista. It was dreadfully slow so I upgraded the memory and that helped, but then I upgraded it to XP and the machine flies. That’s the real difference between XP and Vista – XP was usable. Windows 7 is a polished version of Vista and you know what they say you can’t polish! To be fair Windows 7 is ok.
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Bob makes another good point that computers are lasting much longer than they used to. I blame part of that on tablets being used in the home for quick consumption. But then there’s also how quick can someone type to update their Facebook status anyway? Users don’t need the fastest of machines for the applications they’re running.
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My plan is to retire the old XP machines, but without replacing them. Linux suxs. My other Windows 7 machines can take over some of the work, but I’m already doing more on my Mac than ever before.
Aren’t most ATMs running XP ?
> Aren’t most ATMs running XP ?
They have a cunning plan: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/12/windows_xp_atms/
(The Register has pretty good coverage of the issue, dig a bit there if curious.)
“Microsoft made mistakes with Windows Vista and Windows 8. They need to learn from those mistakes, but alas they probably won’t or there wouldn’t have even been a Windows Vista or Windows 8.”
What about their mistakes of Windows ME and Microsoft Bob? If they really had learned from their mistakes, they would have learned from those earlier ones. Software development on the desktop has reached its “Golden Years”. For desktop software, like politics, there is no memory of the past, only of how to change things in the present.
I think some of the readers here have some good points. Right now I have 2 Windows XP PC’s in my office. I’m rejuvenating one for my 80+ year old mother and the other for in-law. Sure it would be best if I could upgrade them to Windows 7, but they probably run slower. But that’s an extra $100, and worse a training problem. So instead I’m cleaning out the junk that has accumulated in the system, defragging it, etc. Next I’m going to see if I can find a good value on a security suite that will protect the system for a few more years.
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If anyone at Microsoft is reading this — I’d really rather pay you some money to keep these PC’s safe for a few more years. Security Essentials is already installed on these systems and it has been doing a good job. If an 80+ year old person really doesn’t need a new PC, please don’t force the issue.
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Thanks for the comment about iTunes. I wonder if there is a way to run it in user mode?
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Let’s not forget DOS, go to version 3. Version 4 was a dud. Then we had memory management (eg QEMM) and Microsoft fought it. Eventually DOS got some 386 memory management tool.
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Meanwhile we had OS/2 and IBM insisting the world stay on 286 16-bit code when the market had already shifted to 386’s and 32-bit code. Microsoft’s beta releases of Windows/NT were better than IBM’s early production releases of 32-bit OS/2. Then we had that brilliant idea of running 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications on 32-bit OS/2.
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Windows 95, 98, and ME were interesting products. They kinda followed the AOL business model. Microsoft tried to make these OS’s a “market place” where you could try and buy applications. Too much effort was put into the market place applications that no one wanted, and too little attention was given to improving the core operating system. As more and more true 32-bit applications hit the market, the Windows 9x OS’s just didn’t have the capabilities to support them. Anyone’s application could crash the OS and usually did. XP was the right product at the right time.
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There were a lot of dumb OS ideas before Windows XP. We can’t give Microsoft all the criticism. When XP came out it put everything before it to shame.
Windows 95 were squarely in the 16-bit arena (USER.exe was mostly 16-bit). Hence, the failure of the follow on to the original Pentium, th Pentium Pro.
To Cringely’s credit, this is the most vague, bland, and inadequately descriptive clause he’s ever written:
>> Six years was an impressive accomplishment
I hope he really meant “Allowing a product development cycle to drag on for six, long, agonizing years”. 🙂
I think you missed the point.
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Yes Vista was late and then arrived almost dead.
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XP was still a solid and viable OS 6 years after its introduction. It is now 12 years later and XP is still doing its job.
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Normally there’s a new OS every couple years and we have to rush to convert to it. When Vista came out there was no rush, no urgency. When the problems in Vista were discovered, there was no panic. XP was more than good enough to continue being used.
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There are VERY FEW operating systems that could make that claim.
Like most users, I hated the introduction of Windows 8. As a Windows support engineer for a new company supporting the server versions there just seemed to be too many nuances. However the upgrade to 8.1 brought a new revelation. The interface is now almost identical to 2012r2 AND included one very important piece, HyperV. All of my old XP systems are now being converted to VM’s using MS’s “Disk2vhd” tool. A modern day laptop with 16 gigs and a half or one TB drive holds more than a dozen VM’s of which I can run 2-3 at a time, more if necessary albeit at a much slower pace.
My trusty old 2 proc x 4gig XP system with 10+ years of email is now a VM that I can fire up in less than 30 seconds, pause or suspend as needed and even spin off a clone to a backup drive. I have never been this efficient with backups. For support work, a VM with a working GUI of each variation of OS regardless of the version, HyperV is the ticket. Even handy for the toughest job in all of computing, the dreaded “spousal support”. Spin off a copy of the kids machines, or even Mom & Dad or Grammy’s PC. When that call comes in, you can literally walk them through almost anything step by step on your virtual clone.
XP won’t go away in my household for awhile, but it will be running on a VM when it’s needed. Same with the variety of Linux machines that scattered the shelves. My electric bill is going to go way down. The Windows upgrade yesterday put a “Start” button back and while Charms didn’t go away, at least they will run in a window and appear on the taskbar like we spent the past 12+ years getting comfortable with. Not saying this is the best OS for a nominal user with a bare bones PC/laptop but 8.1 Pro with HV is the ticket for me.
Virtual instances of XP are the way to go in the absence of vendor support. But you’re still running XP — any hypervisor would work, no?
Another point I think is missed. When Windows Vista bombed, as it was terrible, it was only when Windows 7 late 2009 did a viable alternative to Windows XP became available. Yet, it still had to prove itself. Perhaps you could consider it was safe to use in 2011?
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PCs were being sold in 2010 with XP, and even later. Microsoft have in effect cut off support for them very early in their lives!
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As Bob states PCs are being kept for much longer. XP really should have been left running for a few years yet. Simply because they had a brilliant product that customers loved and kept bringing out duffers as alternatives! I’m on my second Mac because of it.
It’s funny you mention iTunes, one class of applications that want XP dead the most is content streaming applications. The real biggest feature in Windows Vista was copy protection support all the way from device driver to screen (that’s also why the operating system got slower), but HDCP was required by the content makers for HD – you never saw authorized BluRay playback for XP.
I just built myself a new PC to replace an aging machine running XP, mainly because the hardware was not up to the job anymore, not because of EOL on XP. I would have gone Linux except that a couple of applications I use all the time don’t have Linux versions so I went with Windows 8. Hated the new interface but installed something called ‘Start8’ and now I have a win 7 type start icon and desktop all the time but I can still get to those ‘app’ things if I ever need to (not so far!).
One the whole this setup works fine and I cannot really tell the difference between this machine and the old one other than the speed of course.
I installed the OEM ver of win 8 and I thought that even that was ‘expensive’ but the install was painless and quick too for once!
In the end, it’s just an OS, bit like all the computer softare in my care. I don;t really want to see it, just let me do what I need and it does that just fie.
It’s interesting that the mistake Microsoft made with Windows 8 is exactly the inverse of the mistake they made with the old Windows Mobile interface for phones and tablets.
Back then Bill Gates was convinced that mobile devices should have a familiar interface similar to that on desktops, hence Windows Mobile phones had a start menu and worked the same way as desktop applications as possible. With Windows 8 Microsoft decided that tablets and phones needed a new different interface and then tried to impose that on the desktop, again fundamentally misunderstanding why the previous approach had failed.
Wiredog said…
“The thing about XP was that, after a couple of years, it Just Worked (TM). Dad was running on it until last year, when I got him moved to Windows 7. If I’d known how difficult that would be I would’ve just gotten him a Mac Mini. The learning curve wouldn’t’ve been any steeper, and the applications that come with it are much better.”
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I’m an IT pro working with small businesses, for the most part. They are stuck in a Windows world because of app load. There is still quite a bit of XP out there, but no Vista and 8.0, thankfully. Lots of Win7, which works pretty well.
I also support a very few home users. For those for whom upgrading from XP to 8.x would be a huge culture shock, I’m moving them to Mac. The learning curve is, as Wiredog says, no steeper than the move to a new Windows OS (I think it’s gentler because there are menus by default), and usable apps are either there or cheap/free. They can just relax and use the thing.
“Before Windows XP Microsoft had two PC operating systems. One was the descendant of Windows 95 the other of Window NT” … “Windows XP was the convergence of the best of both”
Wasn’t Windows 2000 the convergence point?
I didn’t like XP so still use Win2K in a VM – only needed to drive my ancient scanner software.
>>Wasn’t Windows 2000 the convergence point?
Windows 2000 had trouble running some of the old DOS/Windows programs. XP could run almost of the old DOS/Windows programs.
>>I didn’t like XP so still use Win2K in a VM – only needed to drive my ancient scanner software.
I have a scanner I bought in 1999. It’s worked perfectly with every Linux distro I’ve used including recent Mint and Red Hat Linux versions.
I’d still be running windows 2000 today if it supported USB.
Win 2K doesn’t support USB? News to me, since almost all the peripherals I had hooked up to my last Win 2K box were USB. I was about to give up on Windows until I tried the then new Win 2K….after 95 and 98, Win 2K was nothing short of astonishing. I ran Win 2K for 10 years until I needed to buy a new scanner and discovered that there were no Win 2K drivers included. At that point I switched to XP for a short time and then made the leap to 7.
Hmm… time plays tricks. There was some kind of missing driver support with 2k. maybe it was a printer or scanner.
It was NT4 that did not support USB. W2K didn’t have native support for WiFi.
I say why don’t microsoft let loose of XP and let it go to open source so developers can legally use the OS to simplify or improve it? I still use XP on many machines i repair or toy with.I also use iOS,android,and Linux.I think microsoft has undoubtedly flopped here.They can let loose of all their older OSes and allow the open source community the chance to keep them going…. i can only say at this point that microsoft is being greedy and not giving folks a chance to write for their older software.
My family just uses the PC to surf and print.
So I loaded a copy of Linux Mint for free. There are only a couple of authoring tools that drive me back to windows.
I work for one of those places where they are still using Windows XP and will for a few more years (current estimates are at least until sometime in 2017)…
Bob is right (and a bit wrong): It’s the apps that offer the real value… but it’s not the apps that one bought on a CD or downloaded from the internet… It’s the in house custom apps that were developed specifically for the business, and here (and other big businesses) we have a lot of them. Some of them can’t and won’t ever work on versions of windows beyond Windows XP.
When MS announced that support for XP would stop there was a general panic and almost an immediate decision to jump on the web (intranet) band wagon, and rewrite everything for the web… A technology not developed for internally and barely used before (except surfing the wide internet, which still requires access to specific terminals and special access rights). Not something achieved in the time frame from MS announcements to the actual date. Other big businesses (and as mentioned governments) are in the same situation…
Maybe MF2 (mainframe2) can do big business offering private XP apps hosting for such organisations. It could be big bucks!!!
XP is dead, long live XP!!!
I find it ironic that MS is falling into the same pattern that IBM had in the late 8o’s.
The epic battle between IBM and MS was Win3 vs. OS/2 – which MS won.
I believe it was in no small part because MS embraced the past and seamlessly host DOS apps in Win3.
IBM had become a bloated bureaucracy that assumed we would all abandon our comfy DOS apps to follow the prevailing leader into the future.
Seems MS has forgotten this strategy. Seems MS has become IBM…. Speaking of IBM, whatever became of the IBM book that Bob was working on?
Um… OS/2 ran DOS applications — including games — nearly flawlessly. And if an application didn’t run out of the box, there were (as I recall) hundreds of ways you could tweak each individual DOS session. But the OS/2 metaphor is apt here because this is exactly the position Microsoft is in with the mobile space — competing against companies who would otherwise be their customers (hardware OEMs) with a product that may be technically superior but has no application support.
I remember those days differently.
New releases of Windows used to be exciting because of the new features and the new promises of reliability. But after a honeymoon period, I would always pine for something new.
When nothing new showed up, I was seriously disappointed. I considered XP SP2 to be semi-new, because the new Security Center and stuff make it consume significantly more resources than the original Windows XP RTM. But, by and large, it was the same thing. No improvements. No new features to try. Same old bugs. Stagnation. I hated it.
I seriously disagree that people stuck with Windows XP because Windows XP was so good. I think people stuck with Windows XP because Microsoft didn’t release anything significantly better for such a long time, that they got used to having to “code around problems” that XP has. And now they fail to move to new versions of Windows because Microsoft allowed them to become fat and lazy. I hate XP even more.
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Linux is a diverse set of useful systems. You’re looking for something, there’s a Linux distribution that can work for you. The problem is all that sunk cost in Windows applications and Windows drivers, which would be a quixotic mission for Linux to support. Same reason some companies still send big checks to IBM for mainframes. I don’t think there will be some magic event that will cause the Adobes and Autodesks of the world to develop applications for Linux, short of Microsoft imploding, and Microsoft seems to be getting their act back together. It’s not the Linux distributions’ faults. The network effect from controlling 90% of the desktop market is impossible to ignore.
Apple has inaugurated a new chapter in computing. Now there are so many phones and tablets that just cannot run Windows, Microsoft’s network advantage is weakening. I’m excited at the future of computing again. Ding dong, the witch is dead. Which old witch? Windows XP! Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead. Yay!
My argument isn’t “stick with Windows XP because XP is so good”, but rather “there’s no real hurry to leave WinXP because (despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary) the newer versions of Windows really aren’t that much better – being built on the same core as WinXP (WinNT), after all, and therefore suffering from the vast majority of the same flaws.” And “fat and lazy” is kind of an unfair label to throw at Microsoft customers (and developers) if they’ve learned some bad habits here, because not only did Microsoft ALLOW this to happen over a period of decades, but in many cases they ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED bad practices of various sorts (practices that they themselves used) despite warnings from others that they should not do these types of things! And in the software industry people often tend to follow the examples set by the vendors, whether these are actually sound practices or not.
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And people still send big checks to IBM (and others) for mainframes (or whatever) not only because of “sunk costs”, but also because many of them have come to realize that the rush to throw away (or to even slowly move away from) these systems was short-sighted and not at all advisable in many circumstances. Most of the companies that I worked for in the past started trying to make this transition, especially for new development, only to learn that in many cases the financial savings that they were told would come simply never materialized (in fact, costs often went up instead of down), and that security and reliability also very quickly went down the tubes. And even relatively new organizations, who had no real legacy software to begin with, are beginning to realize that the current modern IT model (with a full-blown PC on every desk) simply doesn’t make economic sense for the most part, at least once you grow past a certain size.
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My Dad, a senior citizen for some years, had to be led moaning and complaining into computer literacy. When my Uncle Doug passed, Dad wanted desperately to digitize all the music tapes he had lying around of he, my uncle and the band. I made him a cadillac sound computer, with the best Creative had to offer at the time. That kept him busy for awhile. THEN he discovered he could actually create disks of just my Uncle Doug’s guitar tracks. So he made a bunch of DVDs, carried around his own instruments and a mini Amp and entertained family and friends playing in harmony with Uncle Doug. He did this all with a Windows XP box … that died two years back. I really had no choice but to go Win7 with the new box. I wanted more automatic security and cloud backup and all that. But it cost me that Creative Wave Blaster sound editor. Wouldn’t work. So, I asked around and found him an alternative … which he hated because it wasn’t what he’d learned. He retreated to his already-made disks, and just cruised YouTube for music of his era. Read a little email. Watched web-site news and a bit of sports. Saw some photos. Not a lot different than what Mom was doing, although she was a bit more aggressive in email use. Over the last two years, each ended up with a tablet, iPad for Mom and Android for Dad. And the computer I built hasn’t been turned on for anything but updates and to see if it works for about five months now. And frankly, I don’t think they’ll ever see a Windows screen again, after I drive the 200 miles down there and get the box, which has some hiccups as of Christmas past. Microsoft monkeyed around with Windows in an effort to extract our bucks. They made every decision from a short-term profit motive and that near-sightedness, and a baffling ignorance of their customers searching for a true ease-of-use improvement, will cost them in the long-term. And that long term is here and now. I have my XP machines in VMs these days and I test the software I write on them and on my Win7 box. I never bought Vista (for myself or my companies) and Win 8/8.1 is a blip that I won’t notice either. I expect Win 9 might be worth inspection, but I might be so heavily into Android by then that I won’t notice. And that’s the whole family.
Bob,
Have to weigh in on this – primarily from the view of why XP has had so much staying power and alternative operating systems have not (as yet) truly impacted the desktop significantly.
Most of the arguments about desktop domination center on a few points – MS domination of pre-loaded OS; alternative OS (generally Linux) is not polished enough; alternative OS does not have enough quality apps (desktop applications, as in spreadsheets/document writer…etc).
While some of the above may have been and continue to be contributing factors to XP’s longevity, my vote is for inertia.
In a nutshell, it is a huge cost for businesses in terms of training, software conversion (yes, there are tons of software written and running XP level code) to move to an alternative OS. (BTW – I have been running Linux on my personal systems for over 10 years).
At my current work location, we have an extensive number of both in house and vendor supplied software products that run well on XP and have no alternatives (currently) on Mac OS’ or Linux. Desktops are just now starting to be converted to Win 7 and even that is a challenging process. A considerable number of software packages (client / server) that ran on XP will not run in any of the emulation modes as is and require upgrades… some of those clients play nice with the older server side versions they need to interface with, some require server side upgrades as well and often the new server upgrades don’t interface well or at all with the older clients.
Upgrades to new software (OS or application) always contain some pain points (training, functionality changes — (remember the Ribbon when MS first introduced it??), additional software requirements and/or hardware).
For businesses, those pain points have generally been too great to offset the benefits in moving to an alternative OS.
They nearly still are just for the Win 7 upgrade.
For consumers, the pain points are on a far more personal basis — newer is NOT always perceived as better, especially if there is a significant amount of personal time or expenditure that has to be invested in the change. Sort of like having a vehicle that is trusted and maintainable over purchasing a new vehicle that may offer much better fuel economy, but has significant up front and long term maintenance costs that has hand acceleration and braking controls.
Agreed that a lot of why people want to keep running XP is inertia. Part of the problem is that XP just simply worked and worked well.
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But I think we should also add that when you upgrade your operating system you then find that much of what you had bought to run on it needs bought again. There isn’t a simple upgrade. My case in point is QuickBooks. I have this to run my business accounts on. With XP it ran fine, but under Windows 7 it wasn’t quite happy and much of what was written for Microsoft Java wouldn’t run at all. So an upgrade was required.
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One feature that is very useful in today’s modern world is being able to email invoices to clients. Even just POs. With XP it just worked. While that’s a listed feature in QuickBooks it didn’t actually work. So Intuit brings out another version of QuickBooks, which as you’ve already guessed you’ve got to buy to fix the problem with the last one, and their solution is so convoluted that it’s easier just to print to PDF and send it manually! Buying a dog and barking yourself!
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I had to buy two upgrades just because I moved from XP to 7. It’s a high cost, especially when you find that software really isn’t up to the job.
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Microsoft Office Ribbon had me searching the help files to try and decode the hieroglyphs! Really aren’t a fan of that at all – especially as there’s no menu to help you find that function quickly too.
[…] See on http://www.cringely.com […]
First and most importantly there have been several changes in the computer-human ecology:
Several have mentioned Tablets, (important, but NOT the most important).
We’ve passed a point more important than the singularity–the point where the speed of applications is faster than human consciousness (roughly 1/10th of a second).
If your application hangs at 0.1 second or at 0.00001 second, or doesn’t have a speedbump you aren’t going to care. Therefore, there are limits to how fast a computer ever has to be based for those of you not doing intensive Time Step Simulations of Difference Equations (TSSADEQ)….doing a 1000 of them with a 4-6 component model took less time than the perception of a mouse click 10 yr old computer but doing a 100 of them with a huge number of components took 15 minutes!
Re: “the point where the speed of applications is faster than human consciousness”, I guess my consciousness must be super human. My apps have always made me wait. It looks like they always will.
A general comment here.
Times have changed since XP was announced. Back then, there was basically one mode of everyday computing: a windows PC. Back then Linux was for ubergeeks, apple was (still) marginal and only dedicated workstations (in very specialized companies) ran anything else (such as Solaris).
When XP came, it was a huge thing. Business users (who had a good but inflexible OS in W2K) we’re delighted to have an OS, which was media savvy. Home users (who had been jerked around from W95 to W98, W98SE and millennium) were finally offered a serious and stable computing platform.
Fast forward to today(ish). Both Apple and MS are forced to deprecate their older operating systems in order to hasten adoption of the newest and finest. They use different methods – apple uses it’s control of the hardware and application softwares (and aggressive pricing), MS threatens to no longer update (and personally I dislike Apple’s heavy-handed approach). But both are burdened by the fact, that there are older versions, which are “good enough” and that (for most) the new version offers no compelling advantage. In MS’s case XP and in Apple’s case 10.6 were “good enough”
But by far the biggest change is that the desktop (and back in the early 00’s, desktops were still the focus) operating system has lost its centrality. The first change came with the ubiquity of affordable laptops. The laptop was more personal than the previous generation of personal computing, and it also changed focus from power to saving (akin to the shift from horsepower to mpg). The second (and by far more game-changing) is more recent is the shift of focus onto even more personal (and more constricted) computing: phones; phtablets and tablets. In short, the introduction of a new PC OS is no longer a major event.
I hate using myself as example, but in many ways (now that my computer use and the use of those family members whose computers I “manage” is more mainstreamish and less bleeding edge than ever) I believe I have quite a good pulse on what regular Joe’s need and want.
Firstly, we have truly reached the point where a 500€/$ investment will give Joe Public a new personal computer (with OS), which will last his computing needs for 5 years (device failure aside).
Secondly, operating systems have finally reached the point where they can be close to transparent, shifting the user’s attention to the applications and, better yet, the content. But if, and only if, the OS has not changed. Any user’s willingness to learn a new OS’ s behavior is contingent upon the previous OS having been frustrating (which incidentally is the main reason to why Linux is still an enthusiast’s tool).
Thirdly, mainstream users have become more self-reliant in the sense that they have learned to take the marketing BS with a ton of salt – instead of being deadlocked in a cycle of constant updates, they feel secure enough to opt out.
In summary, MS (and apple to a lesser degree) are having a tougher time than ever making money out of operating systems (apple has basically quit that competition) and productivity apps.
Apple’s business model is (for the moment) secure, but one part of MS’s money printing operation is hitting trouble real soon.
P.S. While some view this new situation as gloomy, others (myself included) view it as a huge opportunity. Once the basis is sufficiently stable (functional and unchanging), we will finally be able to start building valuable, functional systems and applications.
RGDS,
As an ex Windows admin, I will always have a love/hate with XP. It did develop into a nice OS over the years, but towards the end, especially in my enterprise experiences, it just did not/does not work well with new hardware.
Even a freshly built or imaged XP machine is slow and clunky compared to Windows 7. Windows 7 is annoying to use until you turn off a lot of the irritating bits, but as far as management goes, it really is great. There’s a lot under the hood and I have to commend them for that.
Renaming and moving things around in the UI for no apparent reason, I have to say is freaking irritating. But like with every major browser nowadays, that seems to the vogue.
Linux is wonderful to use, but I think that most people that use computers are just plain lost in the thousands of flavors.
Most people I know would be fine with Linux, they just browse web, take pictures, play media. But getting the switch is the problem. Once there, they seem fine.
Anyway, yes it is a little sad to say goodbye to XP. 14 years was quite a ride for an OS. IT’ll probably be around longer.
You Windows users crack me up! Windows is a hardware-resource sucking pile of Crap! There OS is so Dogging/dragging to a Computer that there specs for running it keep getting higher and higher! There are Linux Distros that are more secure, More stable and way less taxing to your Computer! Here look here are
10 Reasons why Windows still sucks and I will never use it for anything other then Gaming!
Not that Linux or Mac are perfect but Windows desktop just isn’t cut out for 24×7 operations. Godbid you automatic updates then the you’ll have shutdown the system and restart. By the way that happens to also be the way to fix Windows errors. My most recent headache caused by unknown reasons was the sudden seizure of one of my wireless driver components that opened every port on the interface to run the cpu at 100%. Yep, no virus found, restore last good restore points lasted ½ a day before 100% cpu usage again.
That’s reason #2. The dreaded REGISTRY file!!!
It was an acceptable tracking system for DOS until about Windows 3.1. Microsoft should have gotten rid of the Registry files for Windows 3.11 and beyond. I’m not sure what the Registry does for Windows 7. I do think it adds to the number of overall files tracked by the Master File Table, which when filled causes constant defragmenting by the new semi-automatic Windows 7 background defrag. Same when the MFT is too small for the number of files on the system. One day I find out how to enlarge the MFT table to handle more files.
So, I’m editing the Registry Current User or Current Hardware?
Or will I kill my PC forever by removing this entry? The best anyone can do I think is to backup the entire registry. Then backup the registry item about to be changed or deleted. Windows doesn’t help but you’re lucky you’re making a change you’ve found on the Microsoft Support.
The ever helpful search for a solution
Of course Microsoft please search for a solution. Has anyone ever received a worthwhile solution? After a few minutes I’ve canceled I have nothing.
Wait a minute. Here’s a solution I always love.
I can’t get to the Internet through the my wireless. The solution actually tells me to go online for more solutions. Give me break.
Then there’s the Events.
I’m going to give Microsoft a break. Events can be helpful because even if you can’t debug the message Events at least points to an area you can investigate. Otherwise whatever error 00348992 means is between you and your machine. Originally, Microsoft did provide replies to these errors when you sent them. That’s righ, pre-Dr. Watson if you were lucky you really did get a reply from Microsoft for the error code you submitted. Not too many users back then I guess.
But it’s still DOS
A far as I’m concerned Windows still runs on top of DOS. That and the Registry file are the reasons why with every Windows OS version release your memory, cpu and hardware requirements increase. Seriously Windows 7 Home Premium on 1 meg?
Then why am I still using Windows?
Well, because it’s been around for so long and has that huge customer base along with hardware vendors support for APIs, ActiveX, DirectX and stuff. So, if you want Netflix you have to use Windows, Mac or probably IOS. Stuff on the Internet you’d think was open to all OS’es is proprietary just for the Windows OS.
That ****ed Registry again.
Turns out that quite a number of programs and applications use the Registry file. Some of those programs won’t run if because the Registry file ties these into the Windows OS. So many other programs are tied to the Windows OS. Seriously!! This doesn’t isolate programs from other programs that fail or crashes the system. Doesn’t make it a secure system to me. All above because Windows has a large base of users and vendors.
Finally it runs 3D Games across the installed base
Embarrassed to say that Windows 7 runs 3D games. I know that Linux has 3D games but those are not the quality or quantity available to Windows. Mass Effect 2, Halo Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops, StarCraft 2, World of WarCraft, etc. Yes I know Wine, not the same. Here’s is where I think there’s opportunity for vendors to charge for their proprietary applications. In other words could Bungee, BioWare, Electronic Arts, etc. make money off native Linux Editions without breaking their licenses or copyrights. I’m comfortable with the open source versions of Windows software that’s available for the desktop like LibreOffice, Gimp, MySQL, etc. but great 3D and 3D online gaming aren’t available in native Linux so there is the downfall to Linux. So in closing I don’t use Windows for anything other then Gaming
According to Network World, 95% of the world’s 2.2 million ATMs run XP.
There is a simple registry (one of the worst ideas of all time) hack enables you to get updates until 2019.
“Banks paid millions for continued Windows XP security updates, but a simple registry tweak enables those updates for free.”
Death to XP, long live XP!
I can add little to the comments above, but one thing that the longevity of XP brought was hardware progress.
By the time 10 years passed, the hardware had grown so powerful, it make XP’s minimal HW requirements dwarfed by even cheap machines.
Bu the mid or end life of XP, we were running dual core machines with gigs or RAM, and the old beast simply flew !