In fact, there are over 600 million Windows 7 PCs being actively used right now. The situation with Windows 7 will be even worse, because there are far more PCs out in the world running this system now than was the case with XP when it was retired. Policies are one thing, but what else can you do when a government calls and pleads for help? Worse, Microsoft had to address emergency support requests, such as from the UK governmental health system, when their XP-based PCs were hacked years after support ended. With Windows XP, the firm had to extend support at least twice, and that system was officially supported for a record 12 years. How Microsoft handles this will be interesting. But that doesn’t help individuals or smaller businesses that are using PCs which, by most accounts, will continue working fine past that date, regardless of Microsoft’s semi-arbitrary support policies. It has already agreed to let its biggest business customers pay for additional support well beyond that Janudate, and that support gets more expensive each year going forward. And based on history, especially what happened when Microsoft tried to retire Windows XP, Microsoft may find itself in a difficult position by January 2020. Which is why the next year is going to be so interesting.Īs I wrote in Will Windows 7’s Exit Trigger a Windows 10 Upgrade Wave? (Premium), Windows 7’s user base is made up of individuals and businesses of all sizes, none of which seem particularly interested in upgrading. That didn’t work, of course, and Windows 10 usage only very recently surpassed that of the 9-year-old Windows 7. As such, Windows 7 receives only “limited support” on Skylake and newer generation Intel and AMD processors, a move that Microsoft hoped would lead to improved Windows 10 adoption. Windows 7 is also impacted by Microsoft’s run-in with Intel over the “Skylake” generation of processors. As a legacy Windows OS, Windows 7 is governed by Microsoft’s old 10-year fixed lifecycle policy during which it could get feature updates during that mainstream support period in reality, Windows 7 received only a single Service Pack, and it never really received any major new features. From a support perspective, the key dates for Windows 7 are January 13, 2015, when the system ended its five-year mainstream support cycle, and January 14, 2020, when it exits extended support.
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