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Windows XP Turned 25 This Week and Still Runs on More PCs Than Windows 8
Twelve years after its last security patch, Windows XP holds 0.05% of desktop Windows worldwide, more than double Windows 8's 0.02%. Here's how it launched in 2001, and why it won't leave.
The launch was a New York event six weeks after September 11. Microsoft’s release from that morning lists “a special welcome by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani,” a keynote by Bill Gates, and “an appearance by television’s Regis Philbin at the event in Times Square’s Marriott Marquis Theatre.” Microsoft also sponsored a free concert in Bryant Park “featuring international music and film sensation Sting.”
Gates kept his line simple: “Today is a great day for PC users and a great day for the PC industry.”
The ads had already changed by then. The Globe and Mail reported on launch day: “The central theme of the $200-million (U.S.) campaign was originally ‘Prepare to Fly,’” and that “after the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings, Microsoft executives revised the message.” The paper quoted the new slogan as “You Can.”
Then there’s the wallpaper. Bliss, the green hill under a blue sky, is a real place in Sonoma County, on “a treacherous stretch of Highway 121 south of Sonoma,” according to The Press Democrat. Photographer Charles O’Rear “set up his large format Mamiya RZ67 camera, and took four frames on Fuji film.” Asked about claims it had been digitally juiced, he told the paper, “They might have dialed it up a bit but not very much.”
XP’s support ran out on April 8, 2014. Microsoft’s lifecycle page lists extended support ending at 6:59 AM Pacific on April 9, 2014, so April 8 was the last full day. Mainstream support had ended five years before that.
StatCounter’s September 2026 table for desktop Windows reads like a museum floor plan: Windows 11 at 71.44%, Windows 10 at 27.83%, Windows 7 at 0.55%, Windows 8.1 at 0.09%, XP at 0.05%, and Windows 8 at 0.02%.
The machines still on XP tend to be the ones that run something else: a lab instrument, a CNC controller, a point-of-sale box nobody wants to requalify. Those don’t upgrade on Microsoft’s schedule; they retire when the hardware they drive does. Expect XP to keep showing up in these tables until the last of that equipment gets replaced, and expect Windows 8 to keep trailing it.