Plenty of consumers will continue using Windows XP, he says

Apr 8, 2014 20:46 GMT  ·  By

The time has come for Windows XP to be retired, so Microsoft will roll out the final patches for the operating system launch 13 years ago in just a few hours, even though plenty of consumers are still running it.

Stats show that Windows XP is still installed on 28 percent of desktop computers worldwide, so Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, believes that it won’t completely disappear until 2015 or 2016.

Kandek explained in a blog post that Windows XP still has a hefty market share in some specific countries, including in France where 13 percent of the businesses were still running it in the beginning of this year.

“How long will XP survive? Certainly into 2015 and maybe beyond. A linear extrapolation of the data, which leads one to believe in 2015 as an endpoint, is too optimistic given that companies and governments will buy extended support from Microsoft and there will be operational barriers in other organizations,” Kandek said.

The majority of security vendors building anti-virus and firewalls for Windows XP will support this particular OS version for at least two more years, so even though many would stick to it until 2015 or beyond, third-party protection will still be available.