US Navy Renews Support with Microsoft

Windows XP reached end of life a year ago, I just turned off the last PC on our network running XP last week. It’s been a hard OS to replace as the Navy have found out.

This, rather amusingly, is still generating Microsoft some serious revenue as large corporations are coughing up the obscene amount of money to receive Microsoft’s extended support.

The US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) has closed a $9.1 million contract extension with Microsoft that the agency originally announced earlier this month to extend custom support for the now ancient, Windows XP operating system, as well as the Office 2003 suite and Exchange 2003. According to a Navy contracting announcement, “Across the United States Navy, approximately 100,000 workstations currently use these applications. Support for this software can no longer be obtained under existing agreements with Microsoft because the software has reached the end of maintenance period.”

The renewal will allow the Navy “time to migrate from its existing reliance on the expiring product versions to newer product versions approved for use in Ashore and Afloat networks, and will provide hotfixes to minimize risks while ensuring support and sustainability of deployed capabilities.”

Many of the systems that use Windows XP are currently floating around in the middle of the ocean, unable to be upgraded for long amounts of time due to the location of the vessels.

The navy is not alone in their dependence on Windows XP, the Army also recently approved an agreement with Microsoft to support the 8000 devices they have on the OS.

Thank you to ArsTechnica for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of Computerworld