Kaspersky Anti-Virus to Support Windows XP Beyond Retirement Date

[Reefa]

Windows XP will be officially retired on April 8, 2014, and together with it, Redmond will also cut off Security Essentials support for this particular OS version.

Kaspersky’s anti-virus products, on the other hand, will continue to work on Windows XP after April 8, the company officially announced, which means that users sticking to this platform will still be protected.

According to a report by CIOL, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2013 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 will both continue to work on Windows XP for an unspecified period of time, while Kaspersky Endpoint Security 10 will stop providing support for Windows XP in the second quarter of 2016.

Windows XP continues to be one of the top operating systems on the market, with data provided by Net Applications pointing out that it’s installed on nearly 28 percent of computers worldwide.

Source

[calguyhunk]

Most vendors worth their salt will be supporting XP for another few years at least, irrespective of what MS wants. Not out of love for XP, but out of financial necessity. It's just too big a market to lose out on! Simple as that. Whether MS wants to hear it or not, the reality is that 1 in 3 PC's worldwide (31% as of December '13) still run on XP. ;)

Software makers in the extremely competitive consumer security software business cannot willfully miss out on that big a consumer base. That's because if Kaspersky doesn't sell you their stuff, Norton will. If Norton doesn't, McAfee will. If McAfee doesn't, Eset will. And even if they don't, you'll still have AVG, Avast, Avira, Comodo etc. to keep you safe. There's just too much competition to do anything unilateral. No software maker (security related or otherwise) can afford to go out of their way to drop XP support anytime soon. ;)

Whatever MS's scare tactics are, with all their nagging doomsday predictions, scare-mongering FUD's and all, XP ain't going anywhere soon. Establishments running mission critical XP specific software (not to mention IE6/7/8 specific applications) will not upgrade right away spending millions on a complete revamp of their systems just because MS wants them to and neither will individual consumers running decade old PC's with single core processors and 128/256 MB of RAM just rush out to buy whole new PC's for 300+ dollars just to check E-Mails and post status updates on FB. And what all that means, is that it will be stupid for most software vendors to drop XP support in the near future. :)

But of course, nothing ever lasts forever and XP too will fade away, but it's still a couple or years away at least and that will give enough time for people to get ready for the migration process. Maybe directly to Win9, by which time either people will get used to the "Modern UI" or MS will bring back the start button (as the rumor claims) or people will just shut up and put up. :P

Can't see too many people migrating to Win8.1. It's either 7 or 9 depending on when the push comes. Of course now that MS has stopped licensing Win7 at the retail level, it will be interesting to see if they allow corporates to migrate to Win7 and if yes, will they extend support for Win7 just like XP, because people migrating to Win7 in 2014/15 wouldn't want for support to end in just a few years time as slated (2019's the official date). And if MS does continue to support Win7, they may create another XP that just won't go away! For MS, this is a classic catch 22 situation. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't LOL :P

TL;DR - XP ain't going anywhere anytime soon, whether MS likes it or not :)

Edited January 14, 2014 by calguyhunk

[Ballistic Gelatin]

This is the kind of support that I have come to expect from one of the world's top AV and security product vendors. Kudos to them.

[MidnightDistortions]

Xp will most likely fade away when there is no more hardware to run it or when anti virus software is unable to keep up with security on it.