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There is a relatively old—though still fundamentally true—adage about Windows: Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft, as a specific subset of users (and businesses) only upgrade to the latest version of Windows kicking and screaming. According to SpiceWorks' Future of Network and Endpoint Security report, published Tuesday, 32% of organizations still have at least one Windows XP device connected to their network, despite extended support for XP ending in 2014. (Notably, the last variant of XP, Windows POSReady 2009, reached end of life in April 2019.)
With the looming end of free support for Windows 7, this reticence of users and enterprises to upgrade to newer versions of Windows is likely to create significant security issues. Presently, 79% of organizations still have at least one Windows 7 system on their network, according to SpiceWorks, which also found that two thirds of businesses plan to migrate all of their machines off Windows 7 prior to the end of support on January 14, 2020, while a quarter will only migrate after that deadline.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:11AM
The place I used to work at sold embedded systems, and basically Microsoft's response when we asked about still getting XP licenses was "tough shit". Maybe for larger companies, Microsoft might have changed their tune, but we were way too small for them to care about. We of course moved to Windows 7, but some of the older stuff we had stopped selling some time ago but still supported was never going to move to something newer. They stockpiled a bunch of XP machines for repairs, and smartly would take back working XP machines as trade-ins from customers who would upgrade their equipment and stockpile those too, which gave them even more spare XP machines they could sell as "refurbished".
I'd be a bit curious too about what hardware that system was running too. One of the other issues we ran into was the lack of drivers for newer hardware. For example the last of the new XP machines had an nVidia graphics card - not because it needed one, but because the built-in Intel graphics didn't have an XP driver. And in 2019, there's a fair amount of hardware that doesn't even have a Windows 7 driver, ditto for XP. It wouldn't surprise me if those machines were running some hardware from 5-6+ years ago in addition to Windows XP.