The end is nigh for Microsoft’s most successful operating system of all time. Windows XP is finally set to reach the end of support next Tuesday. After twelve and a half years, and having its death sentence commuted at least twice, it’s time for the sunset of the “experienced” OS. Article after article has been posted as of late discussing the impact of the end of support for XP. The sky is falling for the faithful. But is it really?

Yes, as of April 8, 2014, Windows XP will no longer be supported from a patching perspective. You won’t be able to call in a get help on a cryptic error message. But will your computer spontaneously combust? Is your system going to refuse to boot entirely and force you at gunpoint to go out and buy a new Windows 8.1 system?

No. That’s silly. XP is going to continue to run just as it has for the last decade. XP will be as secure on April 9th as it was on April 7th. But it will still function. Rather than writing about how evil Microsoft is for abandoning an operating system after one of the longest support cycles in their history, let’s instead look at why XP is still so popular and how we can fix that.

XP is still a popular OS with manufacturing systems and things like automated teller machines (ATMs). That might be because of the ease with which XP could be installed onto commodity hardware. It could also be due to the difficulty in writing drivers for Linux for a large portion of XP’s life. For better or worse, IT professionals have inherited a huge amount of embedded systems running an OS that got the last major service pack almost six years ago.

For a moment, I’m going to take the ATMs out of the equation. I’ll come back to them in a minute. For the other embedded systems that don’t dole out cash, why is support so necessary? If it’s a manufacturing system that’s been running for the last three or four years what is another year of support from Microsoft going to get you? Odds are good that any support that manufacturing system needs is going to be entirely unrelated to the operating system. If we treat these systems just like an embedded OS that can’t be changed or modified, we find that we can still develop patches for the applications running on top of the OS. And since XP is one of the most well documented systems out there, finding folks to write those patches shouldn’t be difficult.

In fact, I’m surprised there hasn’t been more talk of third party vendors writing patches for XP. I saw more than a few start popping up once Windows 2000 started entering the end of its life. It’s all a matter of the money. Banks have already started negotiating with Microsoft to get an extension of support for their ATM networks. It’s funny how a few million dollars will do that. SMBs are likely to be left out in the cold for specialized systems due to the prohibitive cost of an extended maintenance contract, either from Microsoft or another third party. After all, the money to pay those developers needs to come from somewhere.

Tom’s Take

Microsoft is not the bad guy here. They supported XP as long as they could. Technology changes a lot in 12 years. The users aren’t to blame either. The myth of a fast upgrade cycle doesn’t exist for most small businesses and enterprises. Every month that your PC can keep running the accounting software is another month of profits. So who’s fault is the end of the world?

Instead of looking at it as the end, we need to start learning how to cope with unsupported software. Rather than tilting at the windmills in Remond and begging for just another month or two of token support we should be investigating ways to transition XP systems that can’t be upgraded within 6-8 months to an embedded systems plan. We’ve reached the point where we can’t count on anyone else to fix our XP problems but ourselves. Once we have the known, immutable fact of no more XP support, we can start planning for the inevitable – life after retirement.