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Microsoft Stops Selling Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 To Computer Makers (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on VentureBeat: Out with the old, and in with the new. Microsoft yesterday stopped providing Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 licenses to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including its PC partners and systems builders. This means that, as of today, the only way you can buy a computer running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 is if you can still find one in stock. Two years ago, Microsoft stopped selling Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate licenses to OEMs. Now Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 are also out of the picture, leaving Windows 10 as the only remaining option, assuming you want a PC with a Microsoft operating system. This is Microsoft's way of slowly phasing out old operating systems.
I wouldn't be surprised if we get Windows "obsidian" some time in the future. It's not "black" right?
I think they're going to get tremendous pushback from customers, and they'll continue selling Windows 7 for a while longer, still. I can't imagine a lot of businesses using Windows 10. That interface is pretty silly.
I don't respond to AC's.
enterprise versions / downgrade rights are still out there right?
Windows 10 or SystemD, or a $2000 macbook pro with crippled ports. These are your choices in 2016.
An admirable goal, but it does not take into account all those computers shipped with Windows 9. They will still have to support those, smart guy.
Unless the customers actively hate it.
In the data by netmarketshare.com, the market share for Windows 10 on the desktop has not increased since August. That is untypical, usually a new Microsoft OS would rise in percentage until a successor is released.
At the same time, the market share for Windows 8.1 is pretty stable since June. Similar for Windows 7, it seems people REALLY dislike the idea of switching to Win10.
Now the question is, where will those people go when Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 go out of support? ;-)
My guess is that many of them will keep their systems despite no more security updates, which may have interesting results at some point
C - the footgun of programming languages
Doubtful, The parent company of the place I work demands all PCs worldwide to be Windows 7 only and they aren't the only corporation that has this policy. We still have software that doesn't run on windows 8/10 so this news is a shafting for us. More likely MS is embarrassed by the consumer dislike of windows 10. MS is famous for putting internal politics ahead of business logic.
Thinking it won't be the color per se, but an enforced OS 'rental' that we should be on the lookout for... on the plus side they won't charge you for upgrades. :/
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
A company I work for has been using Linux in the server environment for, well, before I worked here (+15 years?)... It's always been a shouting match game in conversations about switching desktops from one to the other. We've held on to Windows for compatibility and, more importantly here, familiarity reasons. None of the company employees (sans IT) know what a Linux distro OS looks like, let alone how to use it. I was actually shocked when we had a short meeting about this today - we're forced to in the next two years "upgrade" to Windows 10, or start the process of documenting usage procedures, converting in-house software to Linux-compatible (no WINE), making procedures of all employees' unique or shared daily work make sense in an environment they are not familiar with, accounting for third-party software that is Windows-only, and ironing out the bugs of printing (we have some pretty custom stuff, albeit simple). The meeting lasted less than half an hour and the decision was made to migrate. The third party software and unique printing, uh, debacles will be worked out by virtualizing the Windows OS completely, using snapshots at different points during the day and having the central FS shares be the same as they were. Company policy is to NOT use Windows for any purpose involving Internet activity; the software we use that is Windows-only is internal to us; only uses the 'net to upgrade between versions. We already had LibreOffice in place and people are familiar with it and using it every day. There will be a dedicated, non-internet gateway machine in each department for things that involve HAVING to use MS Office for some reason. Sharing sales presentations will be a snap - from a virtualized instance of Windows 7 until it's necessary for "on-board" or other reasons to use Windows 10 (showing another company that we use the same, etc etc etc). I can't believe the meeting was as short as it was. We've been preparing but just NOT doing it. That has been irritating me for a while now. Better to slowly transition than quickly. But wait, it will be a slow transition because we have a couple of years left! I don't "do that" when it comes to bashing MS just to do it, but this gives me a chance to NOT bash, but thank them in an offhanded way for nicely making the decision for us. You want to force us to be in your control without options, well, now you lose control. Before it was tolerated.
Next you will pay (rent) the privilege to have all the things they took away from you back in windows 10... piece by piece like some kind of sick in game purchase system.
Yep, time to phase out Microsoft....
We just put Windows 10 here at our business and the first thing I had to do was rip out half the operating system (thusly neutering it) and block them at the fire wall. All this in the name of simplicity and privacy. Microsoft. Stop your evil ways....
More like the market stopped buying it...
If that were really true, why were all the serious business PC suppliers still offering Windows 7 Pro preinstalled right up until yesterday, in many cases as the default option when you ordered online ahead of Windows 10? Why did several of them have detailed explanations ready today for how to use downgrade rights to get back to the Windows 7 you actually wanted instead of the Windows 10 that Microsoft now forces them to supply? And why is Windows 7 still by far the largest OS in the marketplace well over a year after 10 was out, despite Microsoft literally giving the latter away and aggressively promoting it to the extent that many people wound up switching to it and then vocally complaining that they hadn't wanted to?
at least to the point where it isn't worth supporting it.
Now we're getting somewhere. Older Windows operating systems do not fit with Microsoft's vision of a service-based, always-online future. Since Nadella is basically betting his business on making that happen (and, to be fair, so far what they're making in other areas seems to outweigh what they're losing in OS revenue) this seems unlikely to change unless and until there is a change in senior management.
I still find it an odd strategy. They're basically playing to the non-geek home users ("Free upgrades! New shinies!") and the enterprise market (Win 10 Enterprise is practically a different OS to the other editions) at the expense of the whole small business, power user and geek level in between. I can see them possibly making a lot of money doing that in the short to medium term. But in the longer term, that middle group is the one that often sets the direction of the industry, and sooner or later a competitor or two will surely exploit that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Can anyone elaborate on this some more?
Each year we ship about a dozen PCs that control research instruments and W10 is not suitable for running them*. While we have started migrating to Linux we will need a stop-gap solution until the end of next year. W7 should fill that gap, but if our supplier suddenly cuts us off we'll be stuck.
Are there restrictions on the physical location of PCs running Enterprise Windows? Can I, for example, buy 10 Enterprise licenses and then install them on PCs and then ship those PCs to the far corners of the globe and expect them to continue to work and be legal? Since these will be running at customer sites no one wants to be paying an annual fee for these computers, and in some cases they can't. The instrument is a one off purchase price and all parts of it must continue to operate for 10-20 years without intervention. I don't buy the argument that paying again for the OS software should qualify as annual maintenance.
I'm also under the impression that most EAs contain a clause forbidding the customer from discussing/disclosing the purchase price? Can anyone comment to the cost of Enterprise? Are we talking USD$500 per seat? USD$1000?
*Quite simply (but among other things) the forced updates and forced restart are complete show stoppers. My understanding is these can be disabled in the Enterprise version.
Where do you want to go today?
Uh, to Linux . . .
No no, they are phasing out customers...
Cause win 10 can go f itself.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Thinking it won't be the color per se, but an enforced OS 'rental' that we should be on the lookout for...
How have people like you not moved to Linux, BSD or OSX yet? If you're that paranoid about Microsoft doing what you say (and frankly we've been hearing the same thing for the past decade anyway) then the fact that you are still using Windows indicates you will probably just do whatever they say anyway.
The thing is though, if they were to have Windows on a subscription basis people would probably pay and it's because MS would offer some additional value that people would be fine paying for. Like what they did with Office365, it's now on all your devices and you get online storage and syncing so people are fine with paying for that. Sure they could get free software but it's not all about money, people will pay for convenience and for things to just seamlessly work together. I can run Windows on my Macbook and it just works, but which Linux distro just works with hi-dpi screens, ACPI power management, broadcom wifi and the touchpad? Certainly not Ubuntu, Mint or Arch, they all have various issues that need immediate workaround and setup just to make them work properly and what you need to do varies wildly depending on the distro and the hardware you want to run it on. And then do you use that abortion that is Unity? Or Gnome3? Or KDE? They are so damn inconsistent, it's all over the place. Now if you see "free software" as the cheap alternative then you probably would have got Linux figured out on your machine but most people won't, they'd rather pay for something that works instead.
We still have software that doesn't run on windows 8/10
Maybe you ought to be working on a fix instead of /.-ing?
Like porting to Linux? :)
More likely MS is embarrassed by the consumer dislike of windows 10.
I'm far from a MS apologist (typing this on a Mac; doing my development on Linux) but I think a simpler explanation is that they don't want to support a 7 year old OS. You can only keep backporting features and fixes that are developed on a new platform for so long. Once the platforms diverge sufficient, it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain that compatibility.
Think of it this way: would you want to port Chrome to Windows 95? Of course not: it doesn't have half the APIs you'd want to use. You could port compatibility stubs, but eventually you'd end up rewriting half of the new OS onto the old until it became a Frankenstein's monster of a beast to maintain.
Where Microsoft really failed long-term is that they established the expectation that software written on the platform will run forever and ever, as a binary, unchanged. That's a terrible idea! On Mac and Linux, the expectation is that vendors will occasionally have to at least recompile their software to run on newer platforms. Simply having that expectation is enough for vendors to be used to it, and for end users to be used to their vendors doing it. Even just recompiling a project with a newer Xcode is often a big feature and performance win so there's not much resistance to doing so.
You don't install an app for most major OSes and expect it to run as-is for the next 20 years. And yet that's exactly what Microsoft has trained everyone to expect, and it's increasingly coming to bite them in the ass.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Sorry this is all a bridge too far. I neither seek nor have a place in any "future" that disrespects people to such an extent.
Tech industry used to be cool. It used to be companies cared at least somewhat about competing on merit providing useful new capabilities and better tools to get the job done. Now seems all anyone wants to do is fall over themselves to manipulate and stalk their customers with business models previously exclusive province of malware vendors.
Incremental improvements to W10 are NOT worth tolerating or wasting time bypassing intentional baked in evil nor am I willing to reward Microsoft by supporting what I believe to be unacceptable and unethical behavior.
Every intentional UX trick designed to covertly leak information, provide false assurances with clever language or cow people into submission reflects poorly not only on Microsoft but the industry as a whole.
It is NOT ok to profit from ignorance of YOUR customers anymore than you would deem it acceptable for a doctor or mechanic to profit from YOUR ignorance.
The cesspool of "me too" followers who use what everyone else is doing as cover for their increasingly valueless schemes does not speak to anything I would recognize as the "future" rather just another lame example of "market failure".
Tell that to certified software.
You know, the kind of software where the results are certified to stand up as legal evidence in court, provided the OS is a set version?
The kind of software used in mission-critical laboratory work around the globe?
The kind of software that in order to be re-certified (if the OS should change, for one example) takes years and costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars?
That kind of software that only runs under Win7.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
At the end of the day ROI is all the bean counters give two shits about.
Well, right. ROI also includes things like making your customers happy so that they buy more stuff, and apparently someone at MS ran the numbers and still decided this was a better long-term strategy.
It is possible to run Linux binaries compiled 20 years ago on modern Linux distros.
LOL yeah. That works great for the handful of statically linked binaries on your system, but good luck running something from '96 against a modern /lib.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Windows 10 other than Enterprise has no UI for disabling updates, nor for setting an Ethernet connection as "metered". When someone connects a desktop computer to a satellite modem, it's through an Ethernet cable. But it's still metered, on the order of $5 to $10 per gigabyte. Or when someone tethers a laptop computer to a smartphone through a USB cable, the phone appears to the computer as an Ethernet adapter. But it's still metered, with pricing at a similar order of magnitude.
Unlike service packs to Windows 10, service packs and update rollups to Windows XP and Windows 7 weren't multiple gigabytes.
They are phasing out customers, like me. You know how Native Americans would herd a buffalo stampede over a cliff, that's what Microsoft thinks it can do to it's customers. They think they can force everyone into renting their OS a service and unfortunately for most people, they are probably right. Nerds that actually care about privacy, security and user control are not their target market of concern. Guess what Microsoft, if you force the nerds to find an alternative, we will find it and eventually we will take the market with us.