Robert Pogson

M$ has recently advised users of XP that “It takes 18-24 months to plan for and deploy a new operating system” in order to hurry people up to migrate to “7″ and reminding them that end-of-support is in about 800 days.

It’s not going to happen, M$. About 30% of PCs are running XP and many of them are a bit old. To buy 450 million new PCs to replace them, in 800 days would need 500K machines per day, about 45 million per quarter. The world is only shipping 90 million PCs per quarter and many are getting GNU/Linux or MacOS. Don’t hold your breath expecting a 50% pop in revenues the next few quarters. M$ has been selling 50 million licences for “7″ per quarter but that includes consumer, business, replacements and new purchases. The replacement part is not the whole ball of wax.

The world has a huge inventory of used but solid and reliable PCs running XP and other OS and they are not going to be suddenly installed of “7″ or “8″ or replaced with a new machine. They will run until they die, in four or five more years, and may well be replaced by tablets or netbooks or any other kind of PC other than Wintel. People will re-install XP and use anti-malware products from other suppliers to keep it alive. Get used to it, M$. The free ride is ending.

According to W3Schools, in the last year, “7″ share grew from 29.1% to 46.1% (+17%) while XP lost only 12.7% and Vista lost 3.9%. A lot of XP machines are going elsewhere. Perhaps as many as 4-5% of PCs are going to GNU/Linux annually. Vista, you see, is much closer to “7″ than is XP.

I like to check the numbers. Suppose you have a five year old PC running XP and you want something faster. Are you going to spend $hundreds on a new PC with “7″ or are you going to install Debian GNU/Linux for a few dollars’ worth of your time and laugh at M$? It’s good to have choice and enough will accept this choice to keep M$’s wet dreams from becoming reality.