That is what I thought first, too. Well, I still think it is a very interesting angle on social engineering as you put it.

However, if you do that with a large enough company to get "undetected" (assuming smaller companies would recognise something fishy is going on) there should be a large risk that this laptop goes to the IT-people first to get completely altered to companies standards.
That usually should mean complete format and using an image of whatever the company is using as client OS. So there goes your malware (at least most of it).

So I am very confident that this has to be taken into account.

Will they be shutting down the coming next 10 years?

SCNR...it is bad for the devs at 3d, but still...it opens a whole new series of jokes.
scheuri

As far as I recall correctly IE7 was supposed to be forced on Windows (XP) as well and was IIRC shipped with Windows Vista.
Now IE8 is forced by Windows Update

Now how is this going to change ANYTHING at all if millions and millions (okay, not that many, but you get my point) of pirated (and even not pirated) copies of Windows XP will not be updated...ever.

Remember the near uprising when windows 98 was not supported anymore. While I was "what, you still use that" thousand of people still were "Hey, I am using this...it just works...I never touched it".

Why is this different?