It is the same with most companies out there. Majority of the information you find out when something is updated, is through word of mouth.
As for the EOL for XP, not every computer that is currently running XP may be able to be fast enough to run Windows 7. Right now my company is test bedding a older Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 for a customer, to see if it will even run halfway decent for them to be able to do basic stuff, while it is running Windows 7.
Even at this point, the machine is running no faster or better than it did, when it had XP SP3 on it.