Blackbird ... MicroSoft are the guys behind the decision to abandon it, I suppose it's just because they'd decided to - move on, financially, technologically.
XP is a great system, and if it were up to a - charity organisation? they'd sure I think tried to preserve things, like people on older systems and older hardware to remain able etc. ...
Microsoft certainly wants to obsolete their pre-Win10 operating systems as fast as they possibly can for reasons known mainly to them - their frantic behavior (giving the OS away 'free', force-pushing it to Win7/8.1 users, etc) over the last year is proof of that. Otherwise, with the increasing web drift toward heavy graphics/video webpages, the use of hardware graphics is becoming more and more necessary to deal with a computer's graphics bandwidth demand. WinXP lacks the latest hardware graphics interfaces, so the combination of chip makers (Intel, etc), large website operators (Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc) and a host of others have their own vested interest in wanting to make XP and older OS's go away - it's become something of an unholy alliance of all the big players. A key way to make the OS go away (and the computer hardware it runs on) is to simply cease being compatible with XP.
Users may not like it, and it may well be less than ethical by some standards, but it is what it is - namely, reality. And it won't end with XP (and Vista); Win7 and 8.1 are next on the hit list. This is why my focus increasingly is to move to a Linux distro on my next system.
