Not dead yet: Dutch, British governments pay to keep Windows XP alive

[ShyWriter]

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Not dead yet: Dutch, British governments pay to keep Windows XP alive

 

Governments pay Microsoft millions to continue support for “end of life” OS.

 

by Sean Gallagher - Apr 6 2014, 7:00am EST

• Information Technology
• Operating Systems
• PCs

Windows XP is supposed to be dead next week. But the Dutch and British governments have both inked deals with Microsoft to continue to keep it on life support, at least for them—under Microsoft’s Custom Support program.

 

On Wednesday, ComputerWeekly reported that the UK government agreed to pay Microsoft £5.548 million (approximately $9.1 million) for continued support of Windows XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003 for all British public sector customers. On Friday, the Dutch government cut its own “multi-million Euro” deal with Microsoft for custom XP support of over 30,000 computers still running the Windows XP operating system.

 

(Shy's note: Money can indeed buy anything... )

 

Those deals may be just a drop in the bucket in comparison to what the US government may have to pay for support of the hundreds of thousands of systems still running Windows XP and other end-of-life software. Despite years of foreknowledge of the end of support for the operating system, there are still a large number of systems running Windows XP within government, including computers on sensitive networks and embedded systems. Many hospitals in the US still use Windows XP on workstations and healthcare devices because software developers have not had their products certified by regulators for use with later versions of Windows.

 

SOURCE: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/not-dead-yet-dutch-british-governments-pay-to-keep-windows-xp-alive/

 

Steve

[Firefox]

That's a lot of cashola....

[David H. Lipman]

Nothing new here.  Paid support was also arranged for Windows 2000.

[AdvancedSetup]

Yeah but if it was millions of dollars I think spending that on automated imaging, backup procedures, etc would be a cheaper and more sound long term solution as one could pretty much ignore updates and security if setup well.