Support for Windows XP
ended over a year ago. By any standard, Windows XP ranks as one of the most influential versions of Windows ever, thanks to its longevity and widespread adoption by enterprises around the world. However, the end of support should have served as a clear signpost to users and organizations to immediately upgrade to newer systems.
A year later, remarkably, Windows XP isn’t quite dead yet. Its exact share can be debated.
Net Market Share data suggests its share as of March 2015 is at around 17%.
StatCounter has this figure at over 11%.
Analytics data from US government websites can be used to get an estimate as well; this data places XP market share at just under 5%.
The risks to Windows XP have not gone away, either. A year’s worth of vulnerabilities that may affect Windows XP have not been patched—only once did Microsoft publicly release a patch for a
Windows XP zero-day vulnerability. In addition, various security upgrades for later versions of Windows have not been retrofitted to Windows XP: a good example is
Control Flow Guard, which is only available in Windows 8.1 Update 3 (from November 2014) and in Windows 10 (currently in Technical Preview).
