The kind of company that is still on XP and is switching because it is EOL isn't the kind of company who will be switching to Linux any time soon.

I'm all for Linux, but this won't happen. The people who leave XP due to running out of paid support options will find no comfort in Linux. Commercial support is too fragmented and not as discoverable as on Windows. People who do not care will stay on XP still. Companies will upgrade to Windows 8, or perhaps 7. I don't see a big demographic switching to Linux right now.

You're also forgetting re-training thousands of employees on an entirely new operating system. That's far more of an issue than commercial support at this point (as the argumentors responding to you have pointed out).

Even though Unity and other desktop environments are quite intuitive at this point, changing over would cause a massive disruption to laymen who have been using a Start menu, Windows Explorer, and Outlook for years.

The benefits of switching (license costs, I suppose) far, far outweigh the benefits.

> Commercial support is too fragmented and not as discoverable as on Windows.

Ubuntu, Suse, and RHEL are commercial support. Novel, Canonical, and Red Hat make good chunks of profits from support contracts. They have a business model at all because of businesses that adopt them and pay for support, and Red Hat is a billion dollar business!

Note most of that support is server side, but I know all 3 offer some variant of standard desktop support as well. So do a lot of Ubuntu PC vendors like system76.

"The people who leave XP due to running out of paid support options will find no comfort in Linux."

I can't be bothered to post links to every distro and every consultant on the planet, but just for laughs:

http://www.debian.org/consultants/

And this is just independents (mostly) and just Debian. I'm sure IBM and other major corps would be glad to help as long as its legal, which is not an issue with FOSS unlike windows.

Now if MS opensourced windows XP as part of the abandonment, that might be interesting.

I just checked your link for consultants in my country. One is a dude with a hotmail address and no website. One is a dude with a simple static website with his picture,name and a message that says basically "We do Everything! Please call me!". One is apparently going out of business. One gave me a warning about dodgy certificates. And finally one that sounded like a legitimate company. Not really something I'd want to bet my company on.

You're lucky you have anyone in your country :) South Africa isn't listed

Or macs, or one of a zillion tablets.

The most entertaining part to watch is psuedo-embedded devices. All you need to do to upgrade, is throw out an entire $10M MRI machine and buy another. Yes your steam boiler is OK but the monitoring system runs XP and we don't sell upgrade kits of just a new monitoring system, although we could make you a deal on a completely new steam boiler system. Or a (in)security system, a HVAC system that runs independently but can only be reprogrammed using some weird XP only driver and software, or a zillion other PC assisted technologies.

That one probably runs Windows XP "Embedded" which will die about two years later than normal XP: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/product-lifec...