Microsoft to Small Businesses: You Pay Now, or, You Pay Later

Written on April 8, 2009  |  by RP Mickler  |  Leave a Comment  | 

Well – some interesting news this week from Microsoft.

Microsoft will officially end support for Windows XP Home and Professional on April 14, 2009. They’ve pledged to continue providing security updates for XP through 2014 but future bugs will not be fixed unless the customer pay a premium.

Meanwhile, XP continues to be sold on netbooks and through OEM channels as a “downgrade” from Windows Vista; HP just received confirmation that it could continue to resell XP Professional on its workstations through April 2010.

This is an interesting paradox for the small business. On the one hand, consumers are likely to continue purchasing equipment from OEM’s with XP on it through next year even though support for bugfixes officially ends this month.

And that’s not even the icing on the cake: compounding this news, Microsoft revealed yesterday that an upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7 will not be possible.

So here’s the message: even though consumers may prefer to purchase XP, businesses that run WindowsXP will face increasing compatibility issues with new software and devices; further, XP users will need to reformat their drives, reinstall their applications, and restore their data to install the next version of Windows. Heck, ntbackup isn’t even available on Vista – natively, backups and restores won’t be possible.

Now, according to Wikipedia, Microsoft still controls 86.3% of the o/s market between XP and Vista (XP accounts for 63-percent of all o/s installations  and Vista roughly 24-percent); Microsoft is apparently trying to get the 6/10 machines to jump into Vista: unless you migrate to Vista first, the small to midrange business faces higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)/migration expenses for moving to Windows7 – which would seem to greatly diminish its ROI.

So, literally, consumers are being financially punished for staying on WindowsXP and avoiding upgrading to Vista – you’re either going to pay Microsoft now, or, pay for the mistake later with higher migration costs. It makes you wonder what alternatives that consumers might turn to when facing the added TCO/migration expenses of an XP transition to Windows7? Apple? Linux? Who knows? All I can say is that Microsoft’s decisions in these area seem extraordinarily uncompetitive; it makes those competitors look much more attractive.

R