Maybe if you suck at abstraction. It's stupidly clear that the infrastructure employed in most institutions has a hard dependency on XP. Probably because of all the bloat that they keep piling on - programs designed specifically around XP's eccentricities.
They must be doing something wrong, my own domain is completely fluid between XP, Vista and Windows 7. :3
A friend of mine works at a place where they all just updated to 7, apparently they like to be on top down there, it wasn't a very enjoyable experience, but I guess they have been on XP for the last 8 years or whatever, so...
But hey, most IT departments probably don't care, because even if they're stuck on XP and it takes over five minutes to boot to a desktop with poorly implemented restrictions which take away user rights and lock them to a single piece of software (likely because they were paid to by some other company, not because said program is actually any good), hey, it works!
If they're anything like my own school's netadmin, it's more likely a matter of "Too much effort" than anything else to use any other software, he just doesn't like the decent stuff, we're still waiting for something other than Paint Shop Pro 6 (He installed GIMP, which shocked me, because he hates Open Source, bring on Firefox please, we have Open Office too O.o). In a school, I must say, having the restrictions is understandable, after all, my school has this filter that doesn't work properly and needs to be configured via the IE Proxy settings, because it wasn't setup properly in the first place, my laptop bypasses the filter completely. :)
There is a reason that guy irritates me, and it's purely down to the fact that he doesn't even let us (or the staff) use the wifi, among other annoyances. :/
I'm not even going to dwell on how awful and unnecessary that is.
Compared to writing on paper, it's actually pretty good, much better than an Excel Spreadsheet anyways, though the system itself is pretty much beta tested on its users come updates, my above example situation was actually the last time they installed an update the day of release, now they wait a couple of months before updating.