[LINK] Windows XP in business

[Frank O'Connor]

Mmmm,

The major problem for most enterprises who want to change or upgrade is that a lot of their existing COM and COM+ apps won't run (without a lot of work and recoding), that ActiveX still lives in those apps, and that only dated versions of .NET (which was never accepted widely by Windows developers anyway ... at least when I was still working 4 or 5 years back) are installed on most corporate networks.

Factor in that the IT departments have been very chary about even updating to current Service Packs for the same reason and there are a number of nervous network administrators when later major versions of Windows (Vista, Windows 7 and now Windows 8) are concerned. They simply don't know what is gonna work, and what is gonna break, that their in-house app developers have been working on.

And when you consider that a lot of those applications are now core to their business, and reach back into their mainframes and other major systems to plumb and provide corporate data .... well, suffice it to say that it's a big concern.

MS lost of a lot of corporate cred with the transition to the disastrous Vista, and whilst Windows 7 is a vast improvement (and I'm not gonna make any judgements on Windows 8 whilst it's still in development and/or vaporware but it's simple imminence means that corporates are reluctant to upgrade at the moment anyway) for corporate purposes I haven't seen much in Windows 7 or 8 that ups the ante an appreciable lot on what XP provides. 

I mean, there's no new DAL, there's no new mainframe/micro bridge API, there's no compelling software suites which are Win 7/8 only, there's no new connectivity capabilities, there's no EAI API's, no business data analysis API's ... aside from a few tweaks customers aren't getting a a whole heap for their bucks. (Home and small business users get some nice features - for small networks, internetting, gaming, applets, device connectivity and the like, but on big corporate networks with their concentration on the back-end, very little has appeared since XP.)

And if they're still solutions in search of non-existent rather than actual corporate problems ... that's no reason to upgrade.

Just my 2 cents worth ...
---
On 27/05/2012, at 3:14 PM, Nick Ross wrote:

> I wouldn't be surprised if it was still the worlds most popular business
> OS.
> 
> ABC uses it. CommBank uses it for just two examples. Which enterprise
> doesnt use  it? :)
> On May 26, 2012 10:52 AM, "David Boxall" <david.boxall at hunterlink.net.au>
> wrote:
> 
>> Walking out of Coles this morning, I noticed that one of their
>> self-serve checkouts had crashed. There on the blue screen were
>> emblazoned the words "Windows XP Professional". How common is the use of
>> Windows XP in business these days?
>> 
>> --
>> David Boxall                    |  Any given program,
>>                               |  when running correctly,
>> http://david.boxall.id.au       |  is obsolete.
>>                               |       --Arthur C. Clarke
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