Retiring software no easier for Microsoft
July 15, 2011
The world's most widely installed computer environment, Windows XP, is getting its death notice this week. But Microsoft has been learning how slowly software expires in enterprises. Especially software that's not broken and is working in mission-critical operations.
We'd like to be forgiven while we include mission-critical and Windows in the same sentence. The truth of the matter is that Windows XP is running in about 60 percent of the world's enterprises, by some accounting. About half of all of the world's Windows computers run XP. This is an operating system that was released about the same time HP began trying to retire MPE/iX. Hewlett-Packard was doing it the same way as Microsoft -- announcing an end of support date for MPE/iX security software patches. Like Microsoft, HP extended its end date a few times.
But now Microsoft has announced in its blog that the end of XP is less than 1,000 days away. "Windows XP had an amazing run and millions of PC users are grateful for it," said Stephen Rose, IT community manager for the Windows commerical team. "But it's time to move on."
This week Microsoft stopped shipping security fixes for the oldest service pack of XP. HP stopped shipping these kinds of fixes for MPE/iX at the end of 2008. And yet here we are more than two years later, watching publishers and manufacturers and healthcare allies continue to use their 3000s. Security patches do prod some retirements, and Microsoft's customers have it easier than 3000 users. At least there's a relatively-similar transition platform for XP applications that is available from the vendor. There's a price attached to that migration, too. To leave XP, PC hardware needs to be replaced along with software.
But Microsoft's transition platform has been for sale since Windows Vista, and then Windows 7, hit the price lists more than four years ago. Offering the next generation of OS hasn't changed the cost proposition for migrating those hundreds of millions of XP computers. In the spring of 2015, the last of the XP security patches will ship out. But if 3000 enterprise managers -- many of whom oversee XP systems -- are any indicator, XP is going to have a lifespan that will run through the end of its second decade. Software dies more slowly than anything except perhaps our drought-stressed trees here in Texas.
Estimates by the Forrester Group show that Windows 7 won't even surpass XP installations until sometime next year. Forrester is confident that enterprise sites will be away from XP by Microsoft's 2014 deadline.
HP was confident its business customers would be off the HP 3000 before the 2006 deadline, too. The call to retirement HP used in 2002 was the inevitability of entropy -- the universal march to failure, chaos and decline in any system. But Adager's Alfredo Rego long ago wrote that entropy, in particular in an IMAGE database, could be delayed. From Database Therapy: A Practioner's Experiences (via the OpenMPE servers and the 1981 Interex technical papers)
You can delay your database’s inevitable failure and decline. You can keep your database in a good state of repair, efficiency, validity and effectiveness. But you must be willing to invest in Preventative Maintenance. Otherwise, you and your database are doomed.
Your problem, as a manager (of the whole universe, of a country, of a company, of a department, of a computer system, of a program, of even one bit), is always this: You must first choose, out of an unlimited collection of possible objectives, the one goal that you want to reach; and then you must also choose, out of a very limited collection of resources, those few resources that will help you reach your goal in a finite time.
All around the world, in places as small as a lone financial services company and as large as Fortune 100 corporations -- yes, even at HP -- computer managers have chosen a goal of preventative maintenance in the face of the resource demands of migrations. This doesn't mean that XP or the 3000 has a limitless career. But just like a gold watch no longer signals the end of employment and the start of a pension, a vendor's date retire an OS is an option, not an event rock-certain to occur in a finite amount of time.