With PC sales stagnating and its fledgling move into hardware still in the take-off phase, Microsoft (MSFT +1.01%) is a company still very much in need of a catalyst.
Thankfully for Microsoft investors, much-needed tailwinds could be headed its way in the coming months.
Microsoft will officially stop supporting its uber-popular Windows XP operating system on April 8, 2014. And it's the hope of many that this could give way to a massive refresh cycle, affecting Windows software upgrades, and -- more broadly -- PC sales.
There's certainly plenty of reason to believe such a refresh cycle might be primed to occur. As of April, there were an estimated 500 million PCs still running the dated operating system. If Microsoft were able to capture only a fraction of this cohort, it could mean big bucks. However, it might not be that simple. In a world where tablet use is on the rise, consumers have more cheap options to meet their basic computing needs than ever before.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft made one thing clear: It wants people off Windows XP. Plus, there are some compelling reasons for consumers to ditch the dated operating system, as Fool contributor Andrew Tonner explains in the video below.
