The problem with XP ...

Why are there so many entrenched XP users? Why are people clinging onto an OS that was released in 2001? Why, despite throwing a lot of ad dollars at trying to convince people to switch to Vista, does over 60% of the market share belong to XP?

The other day I wrote a piece asking those entrenched users if they were ready to leave XP behind and move to Windows 7. This post generated nearly 600 TalkBacks and almost an equal number of emails hitting my Hardware 2.0 inbox. This feedback made for very interesting reading and gave me an interesting insight into why some users are fiercely attached to XP.

The problem with XP, as far as Microsoft is concerned at any rate, is that XP simply was around for far too long. XP went RTM August 24, 2001, and users had to wait nearly three years for SP2 (released August 6, 2004). Retail users then had to wait for nearly two and a half years (until January 30, 2007) for Vista to make an appearance. That means that XP was around and unchallenged for nearly five and a half years. That's a long time. In fact, there are a huge number of PC users out there who have only ever used XP.

Note: Some pundits, such as ZDNet's own Ed Bott, consider XP SP2 to be a different OS to XP. Since it was released as a service pack, I'm going to consider XP RTM and XP SP2/3 to be the same OS.

What XP users are telling me is that in that five and a half years, and the more than two years since Vista was released, they've amassed a lot of hardware (printers and graphics cards are the two most commonly mentioned items) and software (in particular games, image processing, office suites) that they're reluctant to have to abandon all this investment. People are doubly reluctant given the current economic climate. These people have their OS, and have built up an ecosystem of supporting hardware and software, and they're happy with what they have. As Microsoft threw the notion of backward compatibility into wind with Vista, it disenfranchised a lot of users who had made a significant investment in the OS over the years.

Here's my prediction as to how the market share of XP and Vista will change once Windows 7 is released. Initially I predict that the greatest interest in 7 will come from people who have already switched from XP to Vista. I wouldn't be surprised if by 2014 when extended support for XP ends that it won't still have a 10 - 20% market share. We've not heard the end of XP yet, not by a long shot.

Microsoft has tried to encourage XP users to accept Windows 7. XP Mode, while it could be much better and far less kludgy, is at least an indication that Microsoft understands what the problems are. Personally, I wish Microsoft had gone further and made dual-booting easier by allowing Windows 7 users to boot from a Windows XP VHD. that would have given Windows 7 users a safe way to load XP onto their systems and switch between the OSes. Maybe this will be added at a later date.

Selling Windows 7 to Vista users is going to be easy for Microsoft. The hard part will be selling the new OS to XP users.