Statistics regarding Windows XP before SP2, is it worth still supporting it

Question

We would like to drop support for our application on stock Windows XP and XP SP1 and thus require SP2 or higher.

I tried finding some statistics about market share of the various service packs of Windows but failed. Do you have such links? Do you still support XP before SP2?

Answer 1

You might consider Microsoft's own support schedule for Windows XP; they are only supporting SP2 and it appears they dropped support for SP1 and earlier over three years ago.

Answer 2

You can intuit something about pre-SP2 stats from the market share of IE6, since that is the browser installed by default on XP SP2 and below.

Based on these stats, IE6 (and thus, tentatively SP2) still has about 20% market share. The pre-SP2 numbers will be lower than this, since SP2 was such a popular service pack.

Dan's point about Microsoft phasing out support is a fair one; many many pieces of shrinkwrap software these days requires SP2+.