I had a discussion with a coworker a couple of times now, and he said a big company can always just pay Microsoft money to support them onwards. Any truth in this?
Dangerous ports are already turned off with group policy (USB, removable media etc), BIOSes are locked down, hardware is still available that will support XP, the networks aren't directly connected to the Internet so they will either be airgapped or have massive edge content filters and firewalls. There aren't many infection vectors for nasties. In fact most of the machines probably don't even have latest updates on them already. Possible not even SP2.
Microsoft probably won't be paid other than through their select agreements which allow XP use indefinitely. 3rd party consultants will swarm to help any issues for a fee which is still cheaper than upgrading.
The world will still spin and lots of "meh" will be chanted as Windows 7 boxes slowly trickle into production with an old ancient IE9 build on them as and when they feel like it...
This really isn't a big issue for companies and governments despite technology news panic stations and sensationalism.
To be fair, I consider that I'll be using Windows 7 until possibly after EOL as it does what I need. I'm sitting on a second hand 2008 circa Lenovo T400 and have a spare one in the cupboard. It'll do me fine until 2020 - progress hasn't exactly been rapid in IT in the 6 years.
Do you boot up the spare one now and again or have you simply removed the battery and bagged it? Just interested as I'm considering a similar move with X series Thinkpads.
The battery is removed and placed in a box. It's a second hand 9-cell battery with 12 recharge cycles (Paid £20 for it!) so it's been charged to 80% and will be maintained at that where possible. I've investigated rebuilding the packs as well in the future and it's not impossibly difficult.
I'd definitely go for it. There is a vacuum of quality hardware now. Even the latest Lenovo T/X series are cruddy machines.
I'll go back to desktops if the situation doesn't improve by 2020.
I hope to be using a dockable phone then with a mechanical switch keyboard and a monitor the size of a window... we shall see. Thanks.
Those large organisations who care about security but are forced to keep XP for some reason will presumably rely on some solid firewalling. If I had an XP box on a dedicated network without internet access then I wouldn't be too concerned in the short term.
The path of least resistance for the people I talked to seems to be moving to embedded Linux or a Android and rewriting all the software. But they weren't terribly happy about it.