Last July, Microsoft posted up a note on the official Windows blog site that recommended strongly that companies that were still running Windows XP on their PCs to upgrade to Windows 7. This week, during Microsoft's BUILD Conference, company officials were once again pushing for enterprise customers to dump Windows XP. Information Week reports that Microsoft's chief operating officer Kevin Turner told financial analysts this week, "We are end-of-lifing XP and Office 2003 and everything prior, in April 2014."

That date has previously been announced but a large number of companies have still not made the move to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. Turner said, "So for all those companies that have the old products that haven't quite started the refresh, guess what? This has been a great product, XP has been a wonderful product; great TCO has been given. It's now time for it to go." And don't expect Microsoft to offer another extension to XP's life. Turner states, "We're basically giving it a time of death stamp."

While Windows 7 has now been installed in the majority of PCs that are used by individual consumers, most analysts believe that Windows XP, which launched way back in 2001, is still installed on the majority of PCs that are used by businesses. Microsoft hopes that businesses who purchase new PCs, which have Windows 7 pre-installed, will help with this issue. But some analysts believe that a number of companies might decide to use other products, such as Apple's iPad, rather than purchase or upgrade PCs to Windows 7.