Microsoft will no longer support Windows XP from 8 April 2014. I can already imagine the panic that is building at my last company, as they begin – in their 
leviathan style – to start thinking about planning to maybe eventually move up to something else… perhaps. And when they realise the overall cost, someone will have the brilliant idea of going for Lotus Suite (again) instead of Office, because IBM is desperately trying to offload it for peanuts to increase poor sales, and the company I used to work for has such a tight arse, even buying ONE Office licence would have them calling crisis meeting after crisis meeting to “address the issue”.
Thinking back, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were now using abacuses and slide rules anyway. It would have been typical of them to see that as a step forwards.
Migrating systems is not an easy task. In most cases the hardware running XP will be so old it couldn’t run Windows 7 efficiently (or in some cases, at all). When they introduced XP, my first company had to spend a fortune on new hardware. It was funny to see them going through each workstation one-by-one to see if they met the minimum spec, and replacing the boxes as minimally as possible. Oh, and everything ran on 15” CRT monitors.
And the mind boggles at what that same company would do if they looked into moving to Windows 8 with touchscreen capability. Admittedly, my experience of the employees there suggests that touchscreens would definitely be the way to go with them, but the cost…! Oh, the cost!