razorsedge
July 29th, 2010, 05:50 AM
Thanks to sales of the new Windows 7 operating system, revenue in Microsoft’s Windows division jumped 44% to $4.55 billion from $3.17 billion a year earlier as the recent fiscal fourth quarter ending report indicated. While there is a healthy interest in Windows 7 adoption and positive enterprise migration case-studies and consumer reviews, many enterprise users plan to upgrade to XP SP3, not Windows 7.
With Windows XP SP2 reaching end of support lifecycle a few weeks back, running XP SP2 is likely to become more and more dangerous for enterprises. Microsoft will not issue any more patches, meaning that when vulnerabilities are found, it will be up to those organizations to find a work-around or be vulnerable to hackers.
A recent poll confirmed that a large number of enterprises are still running XP.
Fiberlink’s survey found that Windows 7 was running on just .33 percent of computers in their survey pool, with 15.14 percent running Windows Vista, 81.57 percent running Windows XP and 2.96 percent running Windows 2000.
An informal PC Advisor poll found that 1 in 6, XP SP2 users plans to upgrade to Windows 7, while the majority will use Windows XP Service Pack 3.
The largest proportion, however – 60.2 percent – had seen the deadline approaching (or simply accept each new service pack as it’s offered), and are already running – and plan to continue running – Windows XP SP3. Bloggers cited migration cost and legacy applications as the main reasons for sticking with XP: “However, what is a problem is that 74% of businesses still use Windows XP, and for a lot of them, the cost of upgrading all of their machines to Windows 7 is not financially tenable. Thus, companies risk having old computers with Windows XP and new computers with Windows 7 which would fragment their network and make it impossible to streamline systems.
Since a couple of years, owing to a global meltdown in economy, any IT spending by an organization is a big bet. It gets worrisome for Microsoft when the battle is drawn with their own decade-old archaic operating system
With Windows XP SP2 reaching end of support lifecycle a few weeks back, running XP SP2 is likely to become more and more dangerous for enterprises. Microsoft will not issue any more patches, meaning that when vulnerabilities are found, it will be up to those organizations to find a work-around or be vulnerable to hackers.
A recent poll confirmed that a large number of enterprises are still running XP.
Fiberlink’s survey found that Windows 7 was running on just .33 percent of computers in their survey pool, with 15.14 percent running Windows Vista, 81.57 percent running Windows XP and 2.96 percent running Windows 2000.
An informal PC Advisor poll found that 1 in 6, XP SP2 users plans to upgrade to Windows 7, while the majority will use Windows XP Service Pack 3.
The largest proportion, however – 60.2 percent – had seen the deadline approaching (or simply accept each new service pack as it’s offered), and are already running – and plan to continue running – Windows XP SP3. Bloggers cited migration cost and legacy applications as the main reasons for sticking with XP: “However, what is a problem is that 74% of businesses still use Windows XP, and for a lot of them, the cost of upgrading all of their machines to Windows 7 is not financially tenable. Thus, companies risk having old computers with Windows XP and new computers with Windows 7 which would fragment their network and make it impossible to streamline systems.
Since a couple of years, owing to a global meltdown in economy, any IT spending by an organization is a big bet. It gets worrisome for Microsoft when the battle is drawn with their own decade-old archaic operating system