Computerworld - Nearly half of the companies still using the nine-year-old Windows XP plan to keep running the aged OS even after Microsoft withdraws its support in 2014, a research analyst said today.
"IT just really, really likes the XP operating system," said Diane Hagglund, a senior analyst at Dimensional Research, which recently surveyed more than 950 IT professionals about their Windows and Microsoft Office adoption plans. "They say it's just that good, and don't want to mess with it."According to Dimensional's poll, IT pros split on how they would handle the April 2014 retirement of Windows XP: 47% said that they would ditch XP for a newer Windows before then, while 48% claimed that they would continue using XP sans support.
Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP after April 8, 2014 when it issues the operating system's final set of security patches.
The large number of companies that plan to keep XP on the front lines, even without support from Microsoft, stunned Hagglund. "It wasn't just very small companies saying this," she said, adding that the stick-with-XP movement was across the board.
"We're seeing a number of major financial services and manufacturing companies opting to continue running XP without support," said Hagglund. "And it's not a price issue. From the comments we did get, IT simply thinks it's a great OS, one that's still working for them."
For all their talk, enterprises don't plan on running XP forever, only for some time after the 2014 support cutoff. "I think six months or so after Microsoft ends support, they'll really quickly upgrade [to a newer Windows] as they realize the systems are vulnerable because they've not been patched," Hagglund said.
Microsoft has been pushing XP customers of all stripes, including enterprises, to upgrade to Windows 7. While Dimensional didn't query IT professionals about what operating system they were leaving behind as they migrated to Windows 7, they're doing the latter in increasing numbers.
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