We’ve been talking a lot about the anniversary of Windows XP and how much technology and business have changed since a decade ago when it launched. Today we officially commemorate its 10 year anniversary and we also celebrate the anniversary of Windows 7 officially being in market for two years on Saturday.

We also thought it would be fun to represent the shifts over the last decade through this infographic.

Although a lot has changed since we launched Windows XP, the one constant that remains is our focus on enriching people’s lives through the power of technology. As we look back, long-time industry pundit Rob Enderle shared:

“Windows XP represented both an amazing and a sad time for me.  It came weeks after the 9/11 attacks and was held in New York both as a reminder that the nation would and could go on but we’d lost a co-worker in that earlier tragedy and it was hard to get away from remembering that as well.   This was the true beginning of my hobby of building my own desktop computers and XP was a dream to install compared to both the older Windows ME and Windows 2000 offerings.  This hobby was one of my passions for most of the last decade.   What was particularly memorable was how many people thought few would actually move to this OS given how soon it arrived after Windows 2000 only to find that not only did people move, once moved, didn’t want to move to the following versions.   Windows XP surprised the market and became Microsoft’s most popular OS platform to date.   This was also the last OS launch done by Bill Gates personally and my career as an analyst started and was largely made by Bill’s launch of Windows 95 a few years earlier.   During that time, between 1995 and 2001, some of my fondest memories of Microsoft and meetings with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were created and XP represented a turning of the page there as well as Bill began to move on and Steve up to his current role.  XP came at a time when Microsoft was at a peak, Apple had yet to turn the corner, and Google was a couple of kids with an interesting idea.   We clearly knew then that XP signified and came at a time of change, none of us had any concept for just how massive that change would be.” 

While Windows XP was pioneering for its time, it’s clear the nature of work has changed and businesses are able to accomplish much more with Windows 7. Like Windows XP, Windows 7 has seen incredible market adoption with more than 30 percent market share, according to Net Applications. The vast majority of enterprise customers got great value with Windows XP and are moving or have plans to move to Windows 7 Enterprise.

Boeing is known for being one of the world’s leading aircraft manufacturers. With such a prominent role in the aerospace industry, they rely heavily on technology to run their business, managing thousands of desktop applications daily across their business and production environments. As an industry and technology leader, Boeing needed new tools to meet their advanced network security requirements, and to improve PC performance and productivity for their more than 160,000 global employees. Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 fit this requirement – not only have they been able to migrate thousands of applications easily and with minimal disruption to their business, they have been able to capitalize on the enhanced security, system performance and stability in Windows 7. Boeing expects to complete deployment to the majority of the 187,000 of their PCs by the end of 2013.

My colleague Erwin Visser recently blogged about another great customer, Korean Air. Their story is pretty unique in that they have to seamlessly organize over 19,000 employees and flights to 115 cities around the world, which is no easy task. Windows XP wasn’t cutting it for their large and complex environment anymore, so they made the decision to move to Windows 7 to improve business efficiency, all without disrupting employees or the airline’s day-to-day operations. More than 70 percent of Korean Air’s PCs are on Windows 7 now, and the airline plans to be 100 percent deployed by the end of 2011.

These are just a few reflections on Windows XP. Customers are telling us that they’re already benefiting from their move from Windows XP to Windows 7. We encourage you to check out what Windows 7 can do for your business.