The upcoming retirement for support on Windows XP Service Pack 2 is coming fast, July 13th. A lot of IT departments haven’t upgraded from SP2 to SP3 or even Vista or 7. They claim that why fix something that isn’t broken. Windows 98SE worked great when it was retired, as did Windows 2000. Heck, I can put those on a machine right now, and be happy. It’s the support costs that would kill me and Microsoft. It doesn’t make sense to support an outdated product. It’s not so much as a “forced upgrade”, but more of a security issue. Older products are inferior to newer ones, for the most part. Security in the IT field moves quickly. It seems every day a new exploit is found somewhere. Microsoft could hire an entire team to find and patch all these exploits for all their past products, but it would require WAY too many resources for very little (none) return. There comes a point to where you can only do so much before the entire software infrastucture needs to be redone. That was done by moving the consumer OS base to Windows NT with Windows 2000 and XP, same as it is with moving from XP to the Vista code base (and Windows 7). You can’t run your DOS applications forever, even us gamers gave up our DOS games in favor of Windows. Same as you can’t stay with an 8 year old OS with a 6 year old service pack. Time to move on and upgrade. It is broken, and the costs to keep fixing it and maintaining it are getting too high.
“I would expect that come August, SP2 will be getting hard and harder to defend,” said Kandek, referring to the lack of security updates. “I expect to see reliable exploits of unpatched vulnerabilities three or four months later.”