It's a 10 year old OS with a 42% marketshare because Microsoft has been one of the better, if not the best company out there supporting their old products, much more so than Apple. Microsoft worked very hard to maintain backward compatibility for newer OSes and to avoid newer products breaking on their older OSes. Really.
If Microsoft had stopped supporting their olders OSes, stopped backporting new features and just shipped security updates, the figures would probably have been different.
Ask yourself: What incentive does Microsoft have to support users who paid them $15 for an OEM license a decade ago? I genuinely don't get this entitlement the users of legacy-Windows seem to have here. I've yet to see users of Slackware 8 cause massive uproar because Compiz haven't been backported to their 2001 OS. So what's different about XP?
If the mentality that "people are using the old product so Microsoft should fully support old product and backport and make everything work there" were to rule, basically Microsoft would go bankrupt since nobody would ever need to buy a new product from them. That's not how you become one of the worlds biggest software-companies and that's not how you get your OS supported in the future.
Microsoft may have themselves to blame for the remaining large Windows XP userbase having provided too good support in the past, but that in no way translates into obligations to keep on doing that in the future.
They've continued selling it, that's why they have to support it. It was all very convenient for them to offer it cheap to fend of Linux on netbooks because Vista sucked, so they can honour the implicit bargain they offered.
If Microsoft had stopped supporting their olders OSes, stopped backporting new features and just shipped security updates, the figures would probably have been different.
Ask yourself: What incentive does Microsoft have to support users who paid them $15 for an OEM license a decade ago? I genuinely don't get this entitlement the users of legacy-Windows seem to have here. I've yet to see users of Slackware 8 cause massive uproar because Compiz haven't been backported to their 2001 OS. So what's different about XP?
If the mentality that "people are using the old product so Microsoft should fully support old product and backport and make everything work there" were to rule, basically Microsoft would go bankrupt since nobody would ever need to buy a new product from them. That's not how you become one of the worlds biggest software-companies and that's not how you get your OS supported in the future.
Microsoft may have themselves to blame for the remaining large Windows XP userbase having provided too good support in the past, but that in no way translates into obligations to keep on doing that in the future.