Wooing CIOs off Windows XP

“User productivity costs jump up a staggering 40 per cent“, “return on investment over 130 per cent over a three-year period” and an eighty four percent drop in IT support costs are some the latest claims from Microsoft in their campaign to wean users off Windows XP.

These, undoubtedly true, claims are pretty impressive and compelling for cash strapped IT managers, but do they really matter anymore?

With the rise of Bring Your Device policies and cloud computing, what operating system employees use is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

In large organisations that supply workers' computers, most systems are run on SOEs – Standard Operating Environments – which means users have limited accounts and can't install rogue software.

For those organisations wedded to supplying staff with desktop or laptop computers XP is fine and almost all of them are well advanced in their plans to redeploy to Windows 7 or 8 when the XP support period runs out in April 2014.

We're seeing fewer organisations locked into the SOE model as the financial sums and business benefits of moving over to an employee Bring Your Own Device – BYOD – model start to look compelling.

Developing an SOE is a complex, time consuming task for an organisation – the package has to be tested to work on the company's hardware which might include dozens of different types of printers, laptops and other devices. Then it has to be tested on all the software employees use.

In a big organisation developing new operating environments is not done lightly. It's a complex, expensive process.

With a BYOD policy the company can develop a standard desktop environment that runs on a web browser. Staff can then bring their own device running on Mac OSX, Android, Linux or even Windows XP and, as long as their browser is up to date, they can run on the corporate network.

The IT department no longer has to care about what the staff member has on their desk and can focus on more important business technology issues – although sadly the password issue doesn't go away.

For Microsoft, this evolution in corporate IT is a problem. Increasingly big organisations aren't placing orders for big fleets of centrally managed desktops. The IT industry has moved to the cloud.

In a perverse way Microsoft are winning the desktop battle, most of those workers in companies implementing BYOD policies will choose Windows 7 or 8 systems because they are cheap and work well in a business environment. The problem is that's where the profit no longer lies.

While we'll see more FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt – about cloud computing, BYOD and Windows XP over the next year, the battle has been fought and won.

Increasingly Microsoft are looking like an exhausted army that has won an irrelevant battle while the real war has moved elsewhere.

The challenge for Microsoft is to find its way back to relevance in an era where the operating system doesn't really matter.

Paul Wallbank is a business technology writer, broadcaster and blogger and author of eBusiness: Seven Steps to Online Success.