Microsoft is slowly preparing for the inevitable demise of Windows XP.
Redmond will discontinue support for the venerable operating system next April and its warnings to partners are becoming a bit more vocal.
In an effort to ease the transition, Microsoft has already announced a range of programmes and initiatives to gently force customers to upgrade their XP boxes. But it is a daunting task – over the next 270 days Microsoft partners will have to upgrade an estimated 586,000 PCs per day and roughly a year from now we could see a spike in IT department suicides.
Microsoft plans to spend $40 million in fiscal 2014 to speed up its Windows Accelerate Programme, which doesn’t really sound like much from our perspective. In addition Redmond will extend its Get to Modern programme aimed at SMBs. Since it is believed that SMBs are still the biggest XP users, they will need the most help to get everything sorted and they don’t have that many resources to go around.
HP has also joined the fun, with an offer of specially priced HP ElitePad tablets with Windows 8, ZDnet reports.
Another related programme is TouchWins. Although it is not directly designed to speed up XP transition, it does offer incentives to makers of touch-enabled Windows 8 devices.
