helping with the Windows XP transition because the company is winning in all cases:
“IT is not a profession where learnings are captured and shared – Microsoft are not really helping either since they make money either way. If you don’t automate, they send in some consultants, if you do automate, you buy the upgrade anyway. They are agnostic about a problem that is a challenge for all their customers.”There were some that believed that Microsoft might chip in with a special promotion, or even a discounted license of Windows 7 or 8.1 in order to encourage the Windows XP user base to upgrade. But with a desktop market share of around 29 percent, it is becoming clear that a major portion of Windows XP users will be left stranded once the platform is officially retired. A nasty security breach or hacking incident would only mean bad publicity for the platform — withstanding the fact that Microsoft has done all they could have to keep supporting Windows XP some 12 years into release. An unheard of time in the technology industry. What do you guys think of this? Is urging users to upgrade to a newer platform enough (and expected) from Microsoft’s side? Or could the company have done something else to help with this pressing matter? Let’s hear it!]]>
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To me, Microsoft has given the XP world plenty of time to make the change. But, they have not made it easy for them regardless of pricing, etc. The problem is, many no longer have their original Office 2007 (or whichever) CD’s lying around any more. And then you would have to have them on hand in order to do a fresh install and then reinstall all your old programs. It’s nice that you can use EasyTransfer (or others out there) to save your data, photos and files but no way to do so with what matters to these folks — their legacy programs.
However, there are some third-party programs available that can do all of that. But you and I both know that they are not likely to spend money to do that since not spending money is one of the reasons they decided to not upgrade in the first place. To them, “if it’s not broke then why fix it” mentality. Never mind it WILL be broke come April 8.
If Microsoft was really interested in migrating XP users now, then they’d fix it so that they could transfer all programs over to the new install. It can be done for the most part, after all. At the end of the day, XP’ers should just ante up and get one of the cheaper machines out there and use the option to have in on Windows 7 while they can. Look how money they’ve saved in the meanwhile by not upgrading their software/hardware until this critical moment. I believe Microsoft has been more than fair.
Won’t a lot of XP users also need to buy a new PC? Older hardware doesn’t have the support for PAE, NX and SSE2 that Windows 8.1 requires. That’s the only reason I haven’t upgraded my sons’ PC from Windows 7.
What else do they want Microsoft to do? I guess they want Microsoft to work with Dell to give people big discounts on new hardware as well. I guess the only thing they can short of that is give a big discount on both Windows and Office.