[detaro]

I'm generally much in favor of holding vendors accountable when they abandon users, but Microsoft always had clearly communicated timelines for support, and in the case of XP even extended them later (due to Vista being crap). Windows 7 was out for 5 years or so when XP supported ended, as everyone knew beforehand. It's known you wont get support, it's known Windows XP is going to have security issues, what do you expect to happen when you don't take appropriate measures?(options include: replacing it, increased network isolation, virtualization, ..., depending on why you're still running it. Even just a really good backup strategy makes a difference right now).

Customers like this is why we now have Windows 10 where you're force-fed updates and the OS will change under you instead of the change being an upgrade to a new major version that you can delay for years. (Which I'm not happy about, but I can see its benefits on that scale)

The best argument for Microsoft doing wrong here might be that they limit their (expensive) super-extended support to large organizations. Since they do the work, keeping a few boxes with special hardware patched should be an option for smaller shops as well (and is IMHO easier to defend than keeping a large network full of XP desktops running because ?)