Intel blames $1B revenue hit on Windows XP's stubborn grip | Hacker News Reader

Intel blames $1B revenue hit on Windows XP's stubborn grip

cnet.com

46 pointsthemark41 comments

They neglected to mention just how hard it is to "upgrade" from XP. If you want to install Windows 7 or 8 then it will only do a clean install. You have to figure out all the apps you have installed, install media, receipts/keys/vendor site logins, do the "upgrade", and then play system administrator for a long time. Approximately no one has backups, so all that needs to be sorted out too, as well as doing a restoration.

Then new UI has to be learned. Nothing is where it was. Various apps probably had to be upgraded too, and they'll have new UI to learn too. Then they have to figure out system administration - how do you do updates, make the funky printer work, deal with anti-virus. I didn't even mention figuring out that whole 32 versus 64 bits thing either.

The time, effort and money involved, especially for small businesses/organisations and individuals is daunting, not to mention a distraction from what their actual business is. By far the easiest thing for them is to do nothing.

Microsoft really screwed up by not making a good upgrade process. They know how to do it, and did it in the past. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

For people in this situation, there's a product called PCMover from Laplink which we've used successfully on a lot of migrations. It can do XP -> 7, with documents, settings, and installed software, usually with almost no trouble at all. It's well worth the 50 bucks or so.

Unfortunately, the product has a bug that completely kills software updates in Windows 8 systems, and even after we had purchased dozens of licenses of their software and gone to the trouble of narrowing down the scope of the bug to a "definitely a PCMover bug" range, their support personnel refused to look into it and pretty much told us to take or leave their product.

So we quit using it, since we're trying to get all of our XP-using customers to skip 7 and go directly to 8.

But yeah, it's a much bigger pain in the butt for a lot of people than a lot of people seem to realize.

Microsoft also have an "Windows Easy Transfer" - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/feature... - but read the FAQ to find out that it doesn't transfer apps.

In addition to doing an upgrade, users also have to use some other random pieces of software which may be paid, and not a single one will guarantee that your new system will be like your old one. Still a very hard sell.

Intel and Microsoft could make it easy for desktop customers to move to a new desktop and use their old hard drive to run Windows XP in a virtual machine, alongside Windows 10 which includes Hyper-V.

The only upgrade Intel cares about is the purchase of a new system. That is why Intel is taking a revenue hit.

Yes, but the majority of what I wrote applies to new systems too. What a user wants is the exact configuration of their old system to be on their new system. By that I mean installed apps, services, data, registration info, passwords, whatever they have littering their desktop etc. This is still beyond painful, not to mention having to learn new UI etc.

You can upgrade from XP to Vista, and then from Vista to 7. (Although there are some restrictions of which versions of Vista/7 you have to come from and go to, but not insurmountable.)

That said, the VM in which I'm currently testing that process is having some difficulty, for reasons obscured by an always helpful 0x8000000000-type error code.

If you skipped Vista, then how would a regular person go about acquiring Vista so they could upgrade to 7? Also having to do two upgrades is even more painful.

> Then new UI has to be learned. Nothing is where it was. Various apps probably had to be upgraded too, and they'll have new UI to learn too.

Is this really such a problem though (ignoring Windows 8)? Most people upgrade their phones every 2 years, when they upgrade it's probably going to be completely different from what they had before, esepcially taking into account each manufacturer having their own skinned UI and widgets. Even on the same device, popular apps like Facebook and Spotify have gone through many redesigns, but people cope. Why are PCs any different?

There will obviously be a distribution of people. But those who haven't upgraded from XP yet are more likely to find changes disruptive. You should have heard stories about installing alternate browsers and having to change the icon to that of Internet Explorer, because users know the IE icon is how you "connect to the Internet".

Similarly the complaints about the MS Office ribbon interface are rarely about its actual functionality, but rather about it being different than before.

You are right about phone upgrades, but they are far more incremental with only regular small changes across apps and the phone OS. That is far easier to adapt to, than the OS and apps all changing after years of no changes.

The problem is that Vista specs required a new machine so users didn't upgrade, then 7 fixed the spec issues, but MS didn't support a direct software upgrade path from XP to 7. Their official recommendation is back up your shit and do a clean install. I suspect that for a lot of XP users, XP was peak compute and they didn't feel a need to upgrade while their computer still worked. These are Luddites and you shouldn't simply dismiss them. This is compounded by the fact that XP users buying a computer today will get Windows 8, which will completely confuse them. MS dug their own grave.

This explanation might have made sense in explaining sluggish sales of Vista and 7 machines (if indeed such sales were sluggish). Now that people are getting into 10, it strains credulity a bit to blame poor results for this specific quarter on customers' hanging onto XP. Is this truly the first time Intel have noticed this phenomenon? If they've seen it in previous quarters, why did it surprise them this time?

Extended support for Windows XP ended in 2014. All the XP holdouts were expected to have to buy new hardware because Windows 7 is a lot less usable than Windows XP on a Pentium 4 with 1GB of memory. But it seems they haven't.

Theory-crafting: Maybe Intel overestimated the impact of some Microsoft change (say, bringing back the Start button in Windows 10), and projected that "maybe everyone will finally upgrade this year", before realizing that it didn't actually pan out that way.

Except that it probably was not true the previous quarter, where XP market share dropped faster.

How about "it's impossible to upgrade from Windows XP for many users".

Since Vista broke the hardware drivers, many people simply can't upgrade. Once the drivers were broken, you can't upgrade to anything newer.

Now, throw into the mix that Windows 8 is a disaster (try running 5 copies in an office behind a 512Kbps link to the internet--watch them all choke your bandwidth to zero), and Microsoft already quit issuing new licenses for Windows 7 (which was actually decent) and anyone with 2 brain cells is going to ask "Why the hell should I upgrade given that Microsoft is just going to fuck me over. Again."

Lack of NTVDM on 64-bit systems is kind of a big issue too (yes, I know long_mode does not support real mode, but they could have provided an emulator).

I could just keep running 32-bit XP, or I could pay money and do a lot of extra work, hmm..

They make 32 bit versions of 7 and 8 which support real mode.

It wasn't until Win8 that they finally disabled NTVDM by default in fact.

What about the lack of bug and security fixes for XP? How do you deal with that?

P.O.S. machines running XP would be supported up to January 12, 2016. Officially ending them at 1 April 2017

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/product-lifec...

You can try googling for: windows xp pos end of life and check the top 10 links for interesting info

And the lesson is that making things that last isn't good for the business.

That's not the point at all. I'd say the lesson is to understand what your customers want and not fight them on it.

The first iPhone is as usable today as Windows XP is. The difference is that the features present in its successors (and the features NOT taken away) were enough to make the users upgrade (or, depending on your perspective, bad enough to make them jump ship).

This isn't me defending Apple or putting down Micrsoft. We might see this in the next few years with MacBooks or the iPhone as the perceived quality of OS X declines. My own wife won't let me buy her a new iPhone because she is happy with iOS 6.

Or people hear in the news how bad the new version is (e.g. Vista) and avoid it.

Changing operating systems, especially in the PC world, is very disruptive to users. Especially non-savvy ones.

The hell I went through when my mom got a new PC with Windows 8.

I can't imagine Windows 10.

I've been running the Windows 10 preview, and it looks like Windows 8 with a better window manager.

Yes, that's definitely the lesson, not, "make it trivial for your customers to replace your old product with your new product."

Given the number of platform PCs (slap together Dell, HP and the like), and the sheer number of drives, motherboards and power supplies that die, and people unwilling to pay someone $90 + materials to replace them vs. getting a new one... I'm surprised XP has as many users as it does.

I think it is partly due to the failure of Vista, which also reminds me that the reason Server 2003 got an extra year of support is that they waited until after Vista SP1 to release Server 2008.

For some values of "things". Some software should last a long time. Some software (like UIs) shouldn't, and businesses should plan for that.

Why shouldn't UIs last a long time?

so true. I think there's only been a handful of major paradigm shifts in UI on the web that have justified a complete overhaul of a perfectly good UI (pure HTML -> CSS in the late 90s and then the rise of jquery/ajax and to a lesser extent the shift towards responsive and flat design.)

I guess a big OS is a different beast though as it's a billion dollar project in itself - I think at that point they just tweak a bunch of UI so people think they're getting something new.

I was thinking about this, and it seems like Desktop UIs can be preserved for much longer time than some of the modern web ones.

Once you have the whole application, files and version of the OS it was running on in an emulator, you can practically run it anywhere.

Not so with things on the web :(

Take for example HRBlock - it has (or had?) a desktop version, and web version. I've used to desktop, but moved to the web, but makes me wonder - would I be able to review my data on it, 10 years ahead? Granted... I can pull all the data I need (after all taxes follow specific forms), but there are applications for which this is simply not possible.

Imagine if Photoshop/Maya/MotionBuilder/3DSMax/Word/Office were running exclusively on the web (and to some point some of these do). Now what happens in 20 years? Would someone be able to open the files I've created in them?

Yes, there would be someone... But that one would be the old desktop app, running under some VM, maybe under your new fancy watch/or whatever device - but you can still view it.

But not so about the web. If the application was purely done on the web, and even though you were able to export files/data from it, it comes to a point where you might not be able to show this data in much later years.

I still can run my favourite Apple ][, Oric, and protected mode (unreal mode!) DOS thanks for the fact that the application was all there, boxed, and if you've collected all patches ever released - you can relive it again!

Ahh... enough with the rant, you can't catch the web, it captures you :) lol

wow I had never even considered that angle. We are at the mercy of application servers that necessarily WONT be there in a decade. Would be amazing to see a shift towards running some of these things client-end or on a hybrid client-cloud that let you take images of the application state and datasets. Security is an issue but it always will be - if you could defer a lot of the work to the client you could save costs and preserve the web for future generations. Well - 99% of the web is garbage and meta anyway - the idea that the integral text-only parts of wikipedia can fit on a cheap flash drive amazes a lot of people.

That's a great question. I see no reason a UI should change often, that seems counter-intuitive.

Because our physical UI hardware changes drastically, all the time.

Screens change size, and pixel density is always increasing.

Input mechanisms change drastically too. 10 or 15 years ago, almost everything was mice. Now, there are more touchscreens than mice, and there are a hell of a lot of trackpads too.

Windows XP wasn't broken. I can't say that of its "fix."

It depends on which business you are talking about. The provider, or the customer.

It's good for the brand though.

many people being happy with just a smart phone or tablet running a non-intel chip might have something to do with it as well

I wonder if Microsoft could put out some kind "Windows XP+" that would be a modernized-but-basically-identical XP release, that added things like better 64 bit support, drivers for modern storage systems, etc. but left the interface and features people like alone.

Failing that, have any third-parties made an XP-skin for Windows 7?

http://www.classicshell.net/

is kinda that, though it isn't "XP enough" for my tastes.

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