Are you sure it's CIO's?
Being in any if-it-ain't-broke industry applies specific pressures that no amount of new features can ever change, even if potential process improvements are glaring. CIO's simply won't get the budget to push through change.
For many XP support will have to end before any change can be achieved. Typically it will depend on how quickly infrastructure applications stop supporting an outgoing OS. Most likely the biggest flag will be for internet facing hardware.
Outside IT circles senior staff care more about shiney and functional so no matter how derogatory some IT Pro's are towards MS as long as security updates are in place those with the purse strings will likely be happy.
However pull the comforting big-manufacturer support blanket and senior non-IT will likely get very twitchy. If they don't support an immediate change they'll certainly have you chasing legacy software suppliers for exposure clarifications and indemnifications.
For me, I'll have to bury the XP machines with our 2k hardware, deep in the network behind a firewall until they physically expire or I virtualise them with our instances of NT4.
There's no escapes from old OS'es as I was reminded last week when a brand new piece of shopfloor hardware arrived running Win2k on an integrated Pentium IV that needs LAN access.
I for one cannot wait to migrate ALL PC's to Win7 or 8 as it's helping to drive infrastructure change including fewer Server OS'es. I've enough OS'es to understand and manage!
