14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft will officially discontinue Windows XP on April 8, 2014 so the company continues efforts to convince users to move to a newer platform before end of support arrives.
“The bottom line is we released Windows XP during a time when the world was different,” Lane Sorgen, general manager for Microsoft’s south central district, was quoted as saying by BizJournals.
“There is a lot more value built into new hardware now. And when you think about it from a customer’s point of view, the cost of a cyber threat is way more expensive than the cost of moving to a new device or operating system.”
Windows XP currently has a market share of 29 percent on the desktop, so Microsoft clearly still has a lot of work to do in order to move all users to a newer platform.
The problem is that when end of support arrives, the company would no longer release patches and security fixes for XP, which mean that all vulnerabilities can be easily hackable by cybercriminals.