If people haven't migrated away from XP already, they're unlikely to do so in a year despite the company's warnings. A lot of these computers are operating in corporate environments doing god knows what. I shudder to think of them being left naked to security exploits.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd start charging their corporate clients a subscription for updates to legacy operating systems. Might as well make a few bucks off the Luddites. Combine that with incentives to upgrade to newer platforms.
Or they're running industrial hardware with drivers that need to be renovated in order to work with Windows 7.
We just bought two new pieces of equipment at work, more than $100k total. Both of them run PCs with Windows XP. One manufacturer says that a move to Windows 7 is in the works, though they don't know if it will be ready by April. The other won't even offer a timeline.
Which sucks, because IT intends to physically remove those systems from the network after XP's support ends. I don't know why it's not possible to put in some kind of access restriction that would completely prevent access between them and anything outside of the company's intranet.
One of our CMs has a solder reflow oven that's still running some version of DOS 6.
Let it die...
...then give us 7 SP2.
And do "something" to the dev team for Windows 8.
Sending people to Mars with one-way tickets is a way to save a lot of money on
that particular project.
Just sayin'.