Windows XP's demise may be , but Redmond wants to pick up the pace. According to analytics firm Net Applications, XP finished September 2011 with a 50.5 percent share of all desktop operating systems, a drop of nearly 10 percent from just ten months earlier.

Microsoft has made it clear in recent weeks that it will be , a hard deadline the company hopes will light a fire under enterprise customers still running XP on aging iron.

Redmond usually supports its operating systems for 10 years after their introduction. However, it made an exception in XP's case, extending the OS's lifespan by three years due to XP's popularity in the enterprise market.

Your Daddy's OS

If ominous support deadlines won't do the trick, Microsoft is open to more subtle forms of persuasion too. In an October 25 post on the , Microsoft's Kristina Libby discusses how much our lives have changed in the past decade. She writes: