Other than furniture and maybe a few preservative-filled snack foods, not much of anything has a shelf life of 10 years anymore. A 10-year-old TV? It's a low-definition box of tubes. A 10-year-old stereo? It probably has a cassette player, and it definitely doesn't have an iPod docking station. A car from a decade ago? It might still be running, but it's likely to have much more than 100,000 miles on it and be headed for either a cheap used car lot or a junkyard.
It's not that those things don't work anymore -- it's just that either wear and tear or advancements in technology have made them undesirable, if not obsolete. It's odd, then, that Windows XP, a signature product in what is supposed to be one of the fastest-paced, most innovative markets -- enterprise technology -- might very well last a decade. This, despite the fact that its successor, Windows Vista, has been out for almost two years.
Microsoft released XP seven years ago this month, and the operating system is still going strong. So strong, in fact, that its popularity is cannibalizing adoption of its main competitor, Vista. Nowhere are XP's strengths and Vista's weaknesses more apparent than in the enterprise, where, at press time, XP's market-share number was still 87 percent, according to Forrester Research Inc., while Vista's sat at less than 10 percent. To put XP's run in perspective, consider that it came out on Oct. 25, 2001 -- two days after Apple Inc. launched the first iPod. But while the original iPod looks a bit clunky next to its successors -- and not many users would downgrade from, say, an iPod Touch to the 2001 offering -- XP is still the operating system of choice for enterprise IT departments, and some IT managers are actively choosing it over Vista. In August, InfoWorld and Devil Mountain Software Inc. calculated that 35 percent of all enterprise machines that shipped with Vista wound up being "downgraded" to XP. Other IT departments still using XP simply haven't bought new PCs and won't for a while in a flagging economy. What this all adds up to is an extended lifespan for XP -- one that could, in some IT departments, last a solid decade. Sure, not a lot of companies jumped right to XP in 2001, but even those that signed on in 2004 or 2005 will be giving XP quite a ride if they plan to make it last until Windows 7 arrives, currently due in late 2009 or early 2010. "A decade is a long time to be using [XP]," says Paul DeGroot, senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. "A lot of companies won't replace XP until 2011. It's not as though customers have been deliberately hanging on to this old fossil of an operating system. They didn't have a choice for six years, and then they got a choice that didn't turn out to be very compelling." The reasons for Vista's lack of momentum are legion and well-documented -- hassles with application compatibility and PC memory requirements top the list. But, although Microsoft and third-party vendors have alleviated a lot of Vista's problems, some enterprises have simply decided to skip the OS altogether. And that means either looking at alternatives such as open source and the Mac OS, or, more likely, keeping XP up and running until Windows 7 comes out. Living at the Mercy of Microsoft Those companies with Software Assurance (SA) subscriptions can downgrade at no extra cost, experts say. For those not on SA, Microsoft is allowing OEMs to offer free downgrades to XP from Vista Business and Vista Ultimate, and major OEMs such as Dell Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo have embraced that offer. Of course, that might not always be the case -- and therein lies one of the potential, if unlikely, pitfalls of sticking with XP. "The big question is, how tightly is Microsoft going to tie the OEMs' hands with regard to OEM downgrade rights?" says Scott Braden, licensing expert and vice president of Microsoft services at Holland, Mich.-based consulting firm NET(net) Inc. If Microsoft really wanted to stem XP's growth, it could do so, Braden says, by pressuring OEMs to curb downgrade programs or ceasing its downgrade-license program. If Microsoft moved in that direction, companies would have a very hard time completing hardware upgrades and still running XP. Braden, however, doesn't see Microsoft playing hardball with its customers given the company's historical battles with antitrust watchdogs in the United States and Europe. "I think Microsoft is approaching it the right way with this new Vista ad campaign," Braden says, referring to Microsoft's new multimedia effort to plug Vista to consumers and businesses. "They realize that they have a messaging problem. If they play carrot and stick games and use more stick than carrot, they're going to end up back in court again." Support is another issue that might keep some XP fans up at night. Microsoft could, conceivably, stop or slow its support for XP in order to push customers to Vista. "The killer blow is Microsoft patching," says Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO and chief security architect at Comodo Group Inc., a Jersey City, N.J.-based vendor of authentication and security applications that's still using XP. "If Microsoft said today, 'Next month, we're not going to patch XP anymore,' that would leave us no alternative but to move to Vista." However, Microsoft released Service Pack 3 (SP3) for XP in April and is unlikely, experts say, to stop supporting an operating system that still dominates in market share. "If I had to make a wild guess, [Microsoft] probably wouldn't cut off [XP support] until Windows 7 SP1 comes out," says Derek Torres, a Paris-based author who has written and co-written several books on Windows XP and Windows Vista, including "The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista" (Wiley, 2007). Torres also notes that should Vista ultimately overtake XP in terms of popularity, Microsoft is still likely to carry support for the older OS for a few more years. "In 2008, they just now stopped supporting [Windows] Me," he says. The other parties that could play a major role in moving users to Vista -- and hampering XP's survival -- are third-party vendors. If they begin writing their applications for Vista and not XP, users of the older OS will struggle to stay current. But, again, that seems unlikely given XP's market dominance, and Abdulhayoglu says that his company hasn't even thought about ditching XP development. "Nobody is going to ignore such a huge market," he says. "We only recently stopped supporting [Windows] 9x; we only stopped writing for it in 2007. When are we going to stop writing for XP? I can't see it in the next few years." In fact, if anything, some third parties are wondering whether they'll support Vista at all. "They're also having the same conversation that IT people are having: 'Do I want to port my code to Vista, or do I want to wait for Windows 7?'" says Kevin Murphy, CTO of Network Engines Inc. (NEI), a Canton, Mass.-based maker of appliance technology.
One reason XP is still racking up sales is that it's not hard to get. Microsoft officially stopped selling it on most PCs at the end of June, but the company is offering downgrade licenses that let IT departments move back to XP, even with volume licensing agreements.
