With around 95% of the world's ATMs and over 27% of PCs still running WinXP, not counting the ones hiding behind enterprise firewalls, it is rather ironic to refer to XP as dead.  Referring to it as unsupported is certainly more accurate though considering the number of governments and banks around the world which have paid Microsoft to extend support that is not completely factual either.  After 13 years of service, perhaps Microsoft has found a new business model to squeeze a bit more profit from WinXP by charging for updates; if they don't take advantage of it then there are third parties which would be more than happy to profit from those who plan to continue to use WinXP.

This forced upgrade makes some sense for Microsoft as it will lower the legacy workload that XP has caused over 3 new generations of OS but at the same time there is obviously money to be made from supporting large corporations, governments and institutions.  This will also cause a bit of a backlash in the boardroom as the lofty minds in upper management dig their heels in about having to learn a new interface and begin to question what happens when support for the version of Windows they chose to replace WinXP expires and they are again forced to spend huge amounts of money upgrading again.  It is unlikely that a large majority of these companies will make the move to Linux but they may well hear about that OS for the first time and consider testing it in limited fashion.  Two things are for certain; Microsoft has at the least annoyed some very powerful corporate heads and that no one will care when support for Vista ends in 2017.

"Introduced by Microsoft in 2001, Windows "eXPerience" was the seventh version of Windows released by Microsoft as a convergent replacement for the short lived Windows 2000 and Windows ME, becoming Microsoft's first consumer PC operating system based on the Windows NT code base."

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