[saiya-jin]

I can confirm there are plenty of businesses running various systems on XP. It can get even worse, at work we STILL use XP 32 bit as primary workstations (at least Linux on all servers). I am a Java developer, so routinely I have over 3.5 GB of memory taken, on system that can access cca 3.2 GB max. And we're talking about virtualized remote machines, no real desktops (yes, it's crap). At least at the end of the year, Win7 64b coming.

Main reason might not be XP as much as that plague called IE 6. Couple of important intranet apps run only on this. Migration underway, but this isn't apparently such a priority for our management.

What backwardish 3rd world company I work for you ask? Well, one not really tiny private bank in Switzerland...

[andresmanz]

That's hilarious and just what I would expect from a bank in Switzerland. I am a Swiss programmer myself and, seriously... that's one of the reasons why I stopped working for certain Swiss companies.

Three years ago, I worked for a quite popular hosting company. I coded a few features for a web app and had many restrictions, because people at Credit Suisse still had to use Internet Explorer 5. Well, at least I was told so...

[wavefunction]

That's interesting to hear about Switzerland, but it's actually banks in general. I had to support IE8 up until recently on various financial services websites for the company I worked for not because of any actual customers but because our partners at various banks in Australia are often still using XP and even those that have migrated to Win7 are still limited to IE8.

My friend works for a large US bank and told me they are generally limited to IE8 but he had "bribed" the IT department to give him an exceptional upgrade with some fine beer.

[honest_joe]

Switzerland is notoriously known for being a heaven for tax evasion, big financial criminals etc. Why they should be fast to support something new if what they have is not broken ? It's not like they are offering a SW related services. Not at all

[saiya-jin]

maybe because support is gone unless you pay hefty sum, which might hike up in near future or be discontinued altogether? all software is broken in numerous ways, super complex things like OS even more

[serge2k]

upgrading from a 14 year old OS to a 5 year old OS.

ouch.

[rawTruthHurts]

upgrading from an OS put to test for 14 years to an OS put to test for 5 years.

Yay!

[cpach]

If I have to use Windows I vastly prefer version 7 to 8. I don’t really see any reason to use 8. IMHO, the UI in 8 is very clumsy.

[MichaelMoser123]

did they consider to work with beloved IE6 on a virtual machine instance? My uneducated guess is that it would be cheaper, even when counting expenses for training users to start the VM.