Microsoft starts XP retirement process

The longest-lived Operating System from Microsoft- the Windows XP has now stumbled to its death after a “two-year countdown”.

A spokesperson from Microsoft revealed in a Monday blog post that the most popular Windows XP and the business productivity suite Office 2003 will both exit all support on April 8, 2014.

From 8 April, 2014 onwards Microsoft will out an end to all the shipping of security updates for XP and Office 2003.

Since the first introduction of the Windows XP and Office 2003 back in October 2001 and October 2003 respectively, the two have been undoubtedly the greatest software releases of their time, but now with the shift in technology environment, they are quite outdated.

After 2 years from now, when Microsoft will pull the Windows XP’s plug, it would have been a journey of 12 years and 5 months for the OS, which is a two and a half year longer practice of a OS which was set by the Windows NT.

This was definitely not the first time Microsoft had showed and urge for users to dump the Operating System and with it their PC’s too for newer tools.

Earlier in June 2011, a Microsoft manager mentioned that it was time users moved on from the Windows XP OS, while the same year an executive on the Internet Explorer team belittled XP as the lowest common denominator, as it could not manage to run the new IE9.

Till now, the company has not turned on Windows XP like it has on the 11 year old run of the Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).

The Windows XP’s share has been dropping from a while now and because of this Microsoft has been urging users, since the past two and a half years to give up the IE6, taking a step so far in March 2011 to launch a deathwatch website that track’s IE6’s dwindling usage share.

In the last year (as on April 1, 2011), XP has already lost more than 10% points of share, according to the Internet measurement company Net Applications. If XP continues to shed its share at this pace it would definitely have a linear decline and then the OS would be left with just 17.1% by April 2014.

The Net Applications data suggests that some PC’s will still be running on Windows XP, after Windows has retired the OS.

In an email to questions Monday, Gartner analyst Michael Silver said, that the recent symposium survey had the respondents telling them that they have had a 96% of their PC’s migrated off XP by end of support. But around 16.5% of the organizations said that they will have more than 5% of their users still on XP even after the support ended.

Majority of the Microsoft XP users are now migrating to Windows 7, which is, for now, a better option than the unfinished Windows 8.

Microsoft’s Chernyak conveyed that we do not recommend waiting for the next edition of the Windows, and that it is not only important for the company to complete deployment before the support runs out, but the upgrading to Windows 7 and Office 2010 which have gained substantial results during the foundations of the future versions.

Citing to some data that seemed to claim that the OS migration programs in businesses take between 18 and 32 months to complete, Microsoft said that, if an organization had not already started migrating to a modern PC, they were already late.

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