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Microsoft To End Support For Windows Vista In Less Than a Month (pcworld.com)
In less than a month's time, Microsoft will put Windows Vista to rest once and for all. If you're one of the few people still using it, you have just a few weeks to find another option before time runs out. (I mean, nobody will uninstall it from your computer, but.) From a report on PCWorld: After April 11, 2017, Microsoft will no longer support Windows Vista: no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates, Microsoft says. (Mainstream Vista support expired in 2012.) Like it did for Windows XP, Microsoft has moved on to better things after a decade of supporting Vista. As Microsoft notes, however, running an older operating system means taking risks -- and those risks will become far worse after the deadline. Vista's Internet Explorer 9 has long since expired, and the lack of any further updates means that any existing vulnerabilities will never be patched -- ever. Even if you have Microsoft's Security Essentials installed -- Vista's own antivirus program -- you'll only receive new signatures for a limited time.
What you're ignoring is that everything is temporally relative. When you factor that in, there's perfect consistency between what people said when Windows XP was first released, and when support for it was terminated.
In the early days of Windows XP, it was being compared against Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Yes, it did have a childish and inferior default UI relative to what it was being compared against, and people disliked it for that reason. But when support for it was ended some years later, it wasn't being compared against its predecessors. It was being compared against its successor, Windows Vista. Compared to the debacle that Vista was, XP looked amazing.
Windows isn't the only software to exhibit this pattern. Look at Firefox. When Firefox 4 was released, there was almost universal displeasure with the UI changes that had been made relative to Firefox 3.6. But then a few years later the Australis changes to Firefox's UI were released, which were even more disliked. People wished for the return of the earlier UI, not because they liked it, but just because it wasn't as awful as the latest version.
It's a simple ordering, really. For example, Firefox 52's UI is worse than Firefox 4's UI, which in turn is worse than Firefox 3.6's UI. People hate Firefox 4's UI when compared to the much better Firefox 3.6 UI, but they love it when compared to the much worse Firefox 52 UI. The sentiment all depends on the two versions being compared.
It's the same for Windows. XP's UI is inferior compared to Windows 98's and Windows 2000's. But it's much better than Windows Vista's.
This is actually going to be the real problem here.
Retiring Vista is no biggie. I don't know anyone who didn't immediately replace Vista with Seven as soon as it became available. On the other hand, I can also not name that many people who replaced 7 with 8 once that hit the market. Even with 8.1, the amount of people who made the switch is rather low. And I know a lot of people and companies, myself and my company included, that rely heavily on Win7 even today. On the other hand, I do not know any large companies that embraced Win8/8.1 in any way and the acceptance of Win10 so far is, at best, lukewarm, at worst hostile with a big "when hell freezes over" stamp from the CISO.
More recently our development department even started to look around for a replacement of VS15, with the Telemetry blunder in VS15SP2 the switch to VS17 is not a given as it was in the years before from 10 to 13 and to 15. And I dare say we're not alone. CISOs talk. And I'm not the only one who is very unhappy with the direction Microsoft is heading. A simple Win10 rollout as it had been in the past with MS systems where the main concern was whether the key applications will run on the new platform will certainly not happen. This will at the very least include a lengthy and probably quite costly security audit as well. And not even whether it's secure against someone breaking in, more concerning the data that leaves the machine towards Redmond.
You can see that reflected in changes in bidding catalogs as well. More and more you find demands that software development has to be "OS agnostic" or they demand outright that a client has to be provided for Windows and Linux. My guess is that quite a few companies that I have to deal with are at the very least pondering whether it might be possible to think about considering leaving the Windows platform.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Still on XP at home and haven't had malware after 15 years without antivirus software... Of course, I block web ads and know not to click on email linkies. (And, my 11-year old XP machine at work out-boots the modern Windows 7 laptop sitting next to it. Sigh.)