Vox pop: End of XP

Taken from a CRN online poll run in February 2014

Eddie Mahdi, Sales director, Centrix

I am a firm believer in innovating technology, so I see this as an opportunity for business to look to their future rather than having to deal with a one-time fix for something that is getting out of date. The technology is developing at a faster rate and there is more to be gained by looking at the positives. We are educating our clients out in the market about the end of XP. Some are being progressive, but some are tied to their application providers, so they may not have the choice to make for themselves. But I do understand there is a reason for the deadline, so I think there has to be a line drawn in the sand.

Chris Greatrex, CEO, Artis Group

What we’ve seen with the end of XP is increased interest in deployment options such as Office 365. As for any major upgrade, clients are particularly interested in an option that takes away future major upgrades, as Office 365 does. The end of life has been well publicised and has been on the radar of the ICT industry for long enough. Microsoft has, several times, extended support outside of their standard support commitments so has fulfilled its duties in terms of support longevity. Microsoft has indicated that enterprise deployment can take 18 to 32 months from planning through to deployment, so there is a general and somewhat dangerous lag in the upgrade process and that this is not likely to change before April’s deadline.

Nick Beaugeard, Founder, HubOne

While it becomes uncommercial to support an operating system which is now over 13 years old – I was actually at the XP launch when I worked at Redmond – I’m not sure Microsoft have made the move easy enough to encourage people to make the move. The world has moved since Windows XP, and operating system upgrades are seen as incredibly easy. Microsoft will have to stop support at some stage because, at the very least, finding staff who will support XP will get harder and harder. But I think rather than extending support, they should spend some time and money providing a stupidly simple way to upgrade from XP to 8.1. So, should they extend it? Probably not. Should they do a better job of helping people move? Sure.