vincevincevince - 11:34 am on Apr 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

I agree that XP is still very much needed. I do a fair bit of work with the tertiary level academic sector where it is commonplace for them to be using bespoke apps written for Windows NT or 98 as absolutely core parts of their research activities. I'd not be exaggerating if I said that 90% of them fail to run in Vista for one reason or another. Even simple things like direct port access for control systems are so constrained in Vista that the only answer is to retain XP indefinitely.

Note that many of these bits of software were running under XP in compatibility mode already. It's not for old software manufacturers to support a new operating system, it's for a new operating system to support old software.