Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, January 23, 2012 00:31:24 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> But you know, the really bizarre thing is, *all* MS has to do to win over
> all the XP people (or at least the majority of them) is two simple things:
[snip]

That may help, but it wouldn't be enough. There are companies which refused to 
go to XP service pack 3 (and maybe service pack 2 - I don't remember) because 
it broke software that they had (particularly software that had to do with 
keeping track of what employees did on their computers IIRC). If a service 
pack broke that, there's no way that they'd upgrade to Vista or 7.

Also, there are tons of Windows users who see no reason to upgrade. Why 
bother? Especially when it costs money? If they get a new computer which has 
Windows 7 on it, fine, but they won't upgrade their existing systems. XP works 
fine.

And when you consider the IT guys, they frequently want everyone on exactly 
the same OS, and they don't want to bother upgrading anyone, so they avoid 
upgrading for as long as possible.

Heck, my Dad was ticked with XP for being more of a resource hog than Win2K 
and refused to upgrade to XP until he absolutely had to recently because of 
issues with Norton. He's certainly not going to mess with Vista or 7 with 
their fancy UIs until he absolutely has to. There's nothing that Vista or 7 
offers that he considers worth the upgrade.

There are plenty of reasons to not upgrade. I don't think that Microsoft _can_ 
really do anything to get everyone to upgrade short of refusing to support XP 
any longer, which would result in a ton of ticked off customers. Sure, they 
could do some stuff to make more people willing to upgrade, but in the long 
run, the only thing that's going to get people in general off of XP is the fact 
that they won't be able to get it for new computers, so when they get a new 
computer, they end up with whatever the newest version of Windows is.

- Jonathan M Davis