XP is close to dead (but why is it still alive?)

Now that Windows XP is officially out of support, various websites are reporting the current Windows XP share.  I have decided share my stats.  Currently, 5.7% of the Windows visitors to my blog run Windows XP.  That is not a tiny amount.  That is more than my Windows Vista readers (3.16%).  This begs the question, why is it so high?

1) Timing

Windows XP was released in 2001.  This was around the time that non-technical people were getting computers.  Services like @Home were providing broadband internet for the masses.  This means the operating system that those masses of people were running was Windows XP.  Just about every computer you purchased at the time was running Windows XP.  For many of the current internet users, Windows XP was their first operating system.

2) Backwards compatibility

This is something that affects business users more than consumers.  In the workplace, your computers often have speciality programs that MUST work.  This means upgrading has a cost that is much larger than the licensing cost for the new version of Windows.  There is massive testing effort.  Every native program must be tested by QA engineers before a roll out.  To make things worse, many programs need to be heavily modified to work in newer versions of Windows.  This is not always cheap, or even possible.

3) People dislike change

This is probably the biggest reason.  Because XP was the first version that most people used, people know how to use it.  They know the ins and outs of the OS.  They know how to update drivers, open task manager, browse the network and change the desktop wallpaper.  Users have spent users getting used to these administrative interfaces.  Microsoft has a habit of completely rewriting all of those interfaces for every major Windows upgrade.  Users don't want to relearn how to do all of those tasks.