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Ovum claims that Microsoft will lose corporate market

by on13 July 2011


XP cut off will be its swan song
When Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP in 999 days it will lose the corporate market, according to beancounters working for Ovum.

Ovum principal analyst Richard Edwards said that although Windows XP was removed from retail channels three years ago, Microsoft will continue to offer support for this 10-year-old operating system until April 8, 2014. When this day finally arrives, however, Microsoft will no longer provide automatic fixes, updates, or online technical assistance. Moreover, it will no longer provide the security updates that help protect PCs from viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. The assertion, therefore, is that organisations will have to replace their Windows XP PCs with new PCs running Windows 7, or even Windows 8.

However most businesses and institutions gave Windows Vista a wide-berth because of technical and compatibility issues, and so Windows 7 has quickly become the operating system of choice for new PC deployments. But, with sales of tablet and thin-client computing devices growing rapidly, and alternative application delivery architectures starting to take hold, we believe that by 2014 many organisations will have decided to adopt alternative end user computing models; thus making Windows XP the last major corporate version of the Windows desktop operating system, Edwards said.
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