When your corporate is dumb enough to not be able to have an upgrade plan even with a clear roadmap provided by Microsoft well in advance then I feel sorry for them, and I feel sorry for (hypothetical you) for working for them.

Not only corporate. Small businesses have more problems.

My dad is running a small company, and during the DOS / Win 95 era this was a huuuuge problem. Now it may be a less one, but back then, when they had to switch from DOS to Win 95 or Win 98, it took them horrible amounts of time. The company was pretty much halted for months, because of course databases from DOS programs they were using were not compatible at all with Win 98 files.

So they decided to use their DOS programs as long as they could under Win 98 as well. Because if they decided to migrate back then, all they would be doing would be recreating the old databases.

They migrated to Windows XP after a time and many many extra hours of work. And they will stay on WinXp for many years from now too, because the PCs they use are outdated and will not run newer windows versions.

And you don't need to give a fuck. It's a private company and it's their decision when and how to migrate. I can't stand people saying "it's high time to migrate".

Of course people who decide to stay should not expect extended support, but if they decide to stay for variety of reasons, you should not judge them, because you know jack shit.

That's why you don't go into a migration blindly and with all your gear at once. This just shows me that the company wasn't properly prepared to do such a thing.

I never said that it's not their decision. I just said that they might have a completely idiotic IT department or management, it's a difference.

Oh, but I will judge them to fucking hell and back, because there are high changes that they'll be added to the global botnet network which makes my life overall harder due to spam, remote exploit launch points, hash processing distributed networks and so on.

I might not judge them as much if those computers never see the bits of the internet though.

Send me $10,000 and we will migrate right away.

It's not IT company, it's accountant company, and as long as everything works fine, we use the profits to more urgent needs.

You never ran a small business and I can tell that from miles away.

What MS is saying is that flaws they patch in Vista, 7 and 8 will be reverse-engineered and then tested against XP because all these systems share code. And yes, the new systems are more secure and still maintained. XP was a security disaster from the start and won't be maintained.

That said, my older laptop will still be running XP but it's seldom connected to the internet and I know what precautions need to be taken to keep it safe.

If we did send you $10K you'd probably also view it as "profits" and not put it towards migration.

Any accountant should be keeping some sort of maintenance and replacement fund for essential office equipment. If you don't consider your data processing equipment to be urgent needs then I don't know what to say.

Yeah, we will be investing 10k dollars to improve something that works perfectly fine and doesn't require any upgrading. Especially when the only PC that is online doesn't store any crucial data.

Another successful businessman, I'm sure you are. Internet security isn't a priority for every business in the world, you know? But I know, I know ,even a lady at the grocery store should upgrade to Windows 8 and buy a tank. Security is everything.

I just hope you won't end up investing 80k dollars up the road to maintain systems that start failing with no spares/compatibility available. I've seen it before unfortunately.

I wish your dad and his business all the luck in the world.

I hope you mean it and not just being sarcastic.

If you knew how many costs on small businesses are thrown in Poland, you'd know that money on upgrading isn't easy to collect.

I really mean it, no sarcasm at all.

Yup I've done IT big and small. If you're really *sure* it doesn't need upgrading then fine, but you seriously need to do your homework to know that for sure. I've seen PCs controlling something like automation that are anywhere from DOS to very early Windows. They sometimes can't be upgraded because the software on it has never been ported. Or drivers don't exist for legacy hardware.

Unfortunately it far, far more often works the other way around. Software you depend on will sooner or later drop support for very old operating systems. It's really a miracle that XP is still supported at this late date! Especially with accounting, most accountant friends I have have to install a new tax-related software package every year.

Companies big or small seriously need to take this as a sign of what's upcoming and make plans to gradually upgrade. I do feel for you, especially for the little guys, but it's like getting tires for your car... you know you need it and you're perfectly fine until you're not.

It really has little to nothing to do with being connected to the Internet.

This is true, very true. We need to purchase a new license for software every year (because taxes change every year and we are handling people's accounting, so we need to be up to date). So far, we contacted our software provider and they assured us they will prolong their XP support, but I know the upgrade will be imminent at one day or later.

So far, we need money for bigger storage for all the documents we have to print.

btw. I am saying "we", but it's mostly my father who runs the business, I'm just helping since I'm unemployed.

No, it doesn't, that's only in the commercial OS world. Although why you'd want to run a copy of FreeBSD 1.0 is beyond me. I'm pretty sure that you can get early copies of Linux as well.

Of course there are no security patches and the hardware support is lacking, but for people that really want to do it, those are usually to be had without too much trouble.

Are you serious? Security flaws that get fixed in version 3.2 of the linux kernel may very well work on 2.6.5 for example. It really depends how much of the code changed between releases. This is true for any piece of software out there closed or open source.

Tell me this, why do redhat and others backport security patches if what I said above is not true?

That's the sign of an incompetently run business venture. I know that it's trendy to pretend like the future doesn't exist beyond the next quarter, but yes indeed it does and if you wish to continue having a business after the next migration, it's a good idea to have planned for the upgrade you know is coming.

This isn't like a tornado or earthquake that might never happen, vendors do discontinue software after a period of time, and that is something that a well run business will prepare for. Sure, you might not know exactly when or how much, but the more you have saved the less likely that the upgrade will run you out of business.

I honestly wonder what people study in business school because this sort of thinking is all too common in businesses of every size. Even $5 a week is going to add up to over a thousand dollars towards the upgrade, and that's without any sort of interest.
Redhat primarily does it because they're focused on the enterprise market. And there's no guarantee that a particular patch won't need to be completely rewritten to run on an older version. What's more, people using those versions pay a ton of money for the ability to do so.

AFAIK, nobody backports security patches to the 1.x Linux kernel.