Windows XP is dead, or at least it will be dead at the beginning of next month. For many years, it was the operating system the majority of the population used, and even today there are a large number of businesses and private consumers that still use it. With the end of support, these users should probably upgrade to something a bit newer, if only for security reasons, but I can understand why they haven't. It's something I call the good enough theory of design.
The good enough theory is built on the idea that something doesn't have to be the best possible solution for a problem, it just has to work. In short, it must be good enough, a totally functional way to accomplish whatever goals you might have for the product you use. Windows XP itself is the poster child for the theory. It wasn't always the most secure system, though a steady flow of patches, updates and service packs would serve to make it a totally functional system for most users. It was not always stable and there were plenty of flaws in the code. However, at the end of the day, for the majority of people, it was good enough. Whatever flaws there might have been, they were not enough to actually make things difficult for the end user, and since the system mostly worked for most of the user base, it became incredibly popular. It was good enough.
It's a theory that applies to most things in life, solutions that are inelegant or awkward tend to be used because they're functional, and they tend to continue to be used because everyone knows them and there's no real reason to change things around. A new system represents a risk, not everyone will know it and it's not the trusted way that everyone has been comfortable with over the past several decades. The old ways work, we know they work and even if it's not the best way to things it's still the way everyone knows. For someone new just learning their way around a system, it can seem bizarre or obtuse, but there's little incentive to change if something is good enough.
Take my house, for example. The door to the basement is slightly larger than the door frame to the basement. In order to keep it closed and keep the cat out, it's held shut by a small hook. It's a terrible system, and extremely awkward when hauling laundry down the steps. It also keeps the door closed, so there is very little incentive to find the tools and do the work to make the door fit properly. It is, in short, good enough, and while others might find the setup insane, it does what I need it to do.
The problem with XP, and the problem for the millions of people who currently use it, is that it is no longer good enough. It still works, of course, but now that it's not supported it's also inviting new problems for the many people who use it daily. That is likely the reason why support was dropped in the first place, Microsoft itself is sick of doing updates to an old system it has not actually sold in years, and those updates are the only thing between users and the people constantly poking at the holes in the code.
However, since it was good enough for so many people for so long, it's going to be interesting to see just how people react to having to upgrade, change systems and adapt to a world where the thing they are used to, and the thing that has been good enough for so long, ceases to be good enough.
