by HunterEC » Tue Jun 16, 2015 5:17 am
Guys:
My humble opinion is that we should maintain backwards compatibility from XP upwards. There are millions of PC's still running XP in virtual environments, behind enterprise grade firewalls and appliances that are very secure. None of them prone to intrusion. Windows 8.1 is better, by far, than 7. There are good & reliable antiviruses like Bit Defender Internet Security 2015 (latest version). I have it installed in a lot of computers (my customers & mine) running Windows XP and, thanks God, we'd never had an intrusion. Old XP still do a lot of tricks. Personally I still support a lot of XP machines, along 7 & 8.1. Sadly enough, the computers that give us more headaches are Windows 7 based. In my workplace we ended up removing EVERYTHING that was Windows 7 based (including Server 2008 R2) from physical AND virtual environments due to a lot of trouble. We migrated everything to 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 and got PEACE OF MIND.
I have Windows 10 in a virtual environment but it is too early to have a thorough evaluation. Sometimes is a little sluggish in performance since the last 3 builds, the first ones were very speedy.
From a commercial point of view, the most platforms we support, the best. We cannot force our customers to migrate. The PC marketplace is not growing that much according to IDC data. Tablets have replaced a lot of PCs / notebooks. We should build APPS that interface with our PC software. Our company just built an iPad app and everyone (customers) are going nuts with it. This app interfaces with our harbour / FW software.