Wait, Google are being dicks because they continue to support XP, which Microsoft has abandoned, despite it still being widely used, but Microsoft is the only company with a reasonable support lifecycle? Something about that doesn't add up ...
They said on day one and in the EULA that it would be supported until 2012 (10 years). They extended that to 12 years to give people time to migrate. They've been more than reasonable.
Since XP came out, I've got married, had three children, owned two houses, owned 3 cars, have gone from a simple black and white Nokia phone that makes calls to a pocket cray, I've watches wars waged between many nation, I've got 160x the bandwidth on my internet connection, I have no CRTs any more, I can just sit down anywhere and get a WiFi connection and my entire library fits in my pocket,
That's a fuck of a long time. All these people really need to just stop whinging like babies and realise how long 12 years is.
Great, but there wasn't an update to Windows for 5 years after that and even when there was it too buggy to roll out in an enterprise. Windows 7 in 2009 was the first time there was a real upgrade for enterprises and 4 years isn't that long in an enterprise with 1000s of machines most of which will need hardware upgrades/replacing at that point.
