Microsoft Windows 7 Pro: Halloween Horror for PC makers next year Microsoft will stop all sales of Windows 7 Pro to PC makers on Halloween 2016. Satya Nadella’s firm has quietly let slip that October 31, 2016, will be the final day for PC makers to buy copies of the operating system for pre-install. Microsoft updated its product support lifecycle page, here, in October with the change …
It isn't at all like updating completely different branches. It would be understandable if it were XP or the Win9x branches, which were actually too different to the current Windows releases.
Even Apple manages to release security updates to older releases, IIRC Mountain Lion (from 2012) is still getting updates. Oh scratch that, the latest security update is only for Mavericks and later. But still, Apple is perfectly OK with supporting at least two versions backwards ... which in the MS world, would be Win7 & 8.x, so there's that.
And I'm guessing that businesses are going to avoid Windows 10 thanks to the "mandatory updates" feature. It's just a matter of time before an update bricks the OS, and no sane businesses want to suffer that.
Do you realise how much time and productivity you'll lose? Users like what they are used to and the vast majority of them use Windows at work and home. They may be tech savvy professionals I suppose but in the real world of real work that kind of jump is bonkers - having helped people move from Macs to Windows I've seen it first hand.
It's a one-time hit vs the unending sequels of pain and suffering foisted upon users by Microsoft. And Linux Mint is closer to what users (as opposed to admins) are used to when they think "interacting with a Microsoft computer" than the latest set of unholy messes unleashed by Redmond. Not to mention the lack of invasive data collection "features" that Windows 10 so kindly includes as Redmond tries to close the gap with Google when it comes to gathering and selling personal info.
" the unending sequels of pain and suffering foisted upon users by Microsoft".... All I can say is that if your users are experiencing this then you are too inept or lazy to configure your computers properly. I have had no experience of this at all. And as for the "invasive data collection" I can say the same - flipping turn it off - or are you unable?
"I would guess 80% of people at work with access to a PC only use a word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail and a browser"
In another life I worked for a computer training business. I used to train Mac users of Word, Excel, FileMaker Pro and PageMaker on WfWG PCs 'cos the business owner was too stingy to purchase more than one Mac, never mind the software. Win 3.11 was way different to System 7, but that didn't phase the users. The OS is far less important than the application.
"They may be tech savvy professionals I suppose but in the real world of real work that kind of jump is bonkers - having helped people move from Macs to Windows I've seen it first hand."
Younger people seem to jump between different GUIs on different devices fine. Android phone to iPad to Windows (7) desktop PC to MacOS laptop more or less fluidly in the case of a younger colleague. They seem to use a given device for one kind of work-flow, e.g. phone for messaging, so the cognitive switch cost isn't so high. Each task has its own device with a suitable GUI. 'The computer' isn't a single beige box in the corner now.
Coat: I don't use Windows at home, and the Minty Penguins are out in force, so I'm off.
Depends on your applications I guess - most of the very large corporates I work in would take a huge cost hit moving all their application cruft over to a non-Windows compatible environment. Custom spreadsheet macros that won't translate between Excel and OpenOffice (or other Linux compatible Office package of your choice) would be just the start of a long long painful process.
Doubt the savings would ever add up in a lot of them. User retraining would be a drop in the cost ocean!
"Depends on your applications I guess..."
I'm running Excel 2010 (32 bit) under Wine. What has Open Office to do with this? Dunno if complex macros run; I don't use them. But if I did and they were I'd run Excel in a VM. If your users need retraining to double-click an icon on the desktop and single click the Menu* button and choose from the flyout menus then they are already incapable of interacting with a Windows PC.
* Mint's equivalent to the Start button. The button to its right displays the desktop.
Excel macros should be scrapped as a serious security breach waiting happen. I doubt most are much more than amateur hack jobs. Otherwise, transitioning away from Windows may be cheaper than one might think. If most of the applications are browser based using a framework such as Rails, Nodejs, or Django using a proper database most users would not care. It would be very easy to deploy and overall probably easier to maintain and inherently cross platform.
"Excel macros should be scrapped as a serious security breach waiting happen"
I have a farmer friend who has an Excel sheet where he inputs the crops to be grown in each paddock and the macros, using past fertiliser records, knowledge of paddock area etc calculate how much fertilser to purchase, when to apply, ditto for irrigation based on continuous input of rainfall and evapotranspiration... But they are fucking farmers ferchrissake. We can't have this. Let 'em use pencils and paper (or perhaps styli and wax tablets). Or am I missing something?
MS don't care a jot.
Our company has just sold itself to the Devil and signed us up to Office 365. MS is hosting it all on Azure.
Now we have staff in at least 100 countries so whats the betting that the 'cloud' is somewhere in Redmond.
We all have to login using a microsoft url.
Everything we do will be slurped by MS and forwarded to the NSA in an instant.
Apparently our Sharepoint archive is also mocing to Azure (and by implication to the NSA).
So much for keeping Data on EU citizens in the EU eh?
I'm (perversely) happy that I'm getting made redundant in April. I shall be able to leave that part of my life behind for good.
Corporates who aren't switching off all telemetry are not worthy of the name.
If you're an admin and you leave all that userland stuff running, you should be fired. If you don't know how because "ew Windows 10 oh noez I'm never installing it the Register said it would steal my bank account details" then you're incompetent and you should be fired and sued.
>Win10 Enterprise does not have mandatory upgrades.
Depends on whether you go with the CBB or LTSB service branch. Certainly I expect many with volume license agreements will go with LTSB. The irritation will be that this will most probably be the cheapest branch for MS to maintain, but will be the most expensive to licence...
What is going to be interesting to see is whether they do similar service branches for Office 2016...
Its seems to me that Windows 10 will be the "first ones free" model as well. I think that's why they are trying to eradicate all the perpetual licences and move people off older versions as 'persuasively' and as fast as they can. Its obvious they're eager to monetize the Win 10 users as fast as they possibly can.
I'm pretty certain once they've got a critical mass that have given up their Win XP/7/8Vista licences that they could use as long as they wanted the charges will come, whether is via holding user data to ransom via Azure and charging for it, or charging an Office 365 type subscription, its bound to come. It's blatantly obvious the "cloud first, Windows as a service" model is intended to generate a regular income from their userbase, Windows 10 isn't being given away as a charitable donation.
Now perhaps my cynicism is on overdrive today, but does that enormo number also factor in when a given box has 'downloaded' whine 10 more than once?
Or is it 'licences acquired' - note NOT purchased
Nor factoring in downgrade rights etc.
Hey I could be wrong (again)...
If your company is willing to spend a little extra (OK, a lot extra) on Software Assurance, they get access to the Long Term Servicing Branch in Windows 10 Enterprise. This is about as close to the traditional RTM --> Security Patches --> Service Pack model that Microsoft is going to let people have now.
The only problem I see is this -- LTSB gets security updates, but not "feature updates." Where do bug fixes lie in this spectrum? Example: if someone demonstrates a true bug in IE 11, as shipped in LTSB, are they going to force them to upgrade to whatever IE 11 revision is current at that time and force a "feature upgrade" as well?
According to all the reports I've seen LTSB will get bug fixes.
My concern is where a new technology comes out or Standard is agreed, such WiFi WPA2-Enterprise using PKI and AES that really requires an OS level change. With XP MS did show some flexibility and released a WiFi client update, but it was a manual download.
I hadn't thought of this until now, but won't the future versions of WIndows 10 make software development/maintenance a nightmare?
Currently, if I have an application that runs on Win 7 and not 10, I can tell that to my customers. If all future incarnations of Windows are Win 10 (and that includes the multitudes of changes MS will apply at any time in the future), how do I inform users (or even how do I know) whether their version of Win 10 is compatible or not? Are all users expected to know their build numbers?
Microsoft believe the reverse of your problem is true because everybody will be running W10. OR ELSE! And they will all be at similar service level, corporates and home users. This is the message I'm getting. Devs will no longer code for earlier versions of Windows.
>I hadn't thought of this until now, but won't the future versions of WIndows 10 make software development/maintenance a nightmare?
Not really, you develop for LTSB, you do testing against the periodic CBB releases and you may add optional functionality to take advantage of CBB releases. I'd ignore the CB releases unless users report things breaking...
The nightmare will be avoiding the issues associated with .NET applications. Remember with Office 2007 it would work with .NET 2 but if you had previously installed a later version it would enable more functionality, however, if you updated .NET after installing Office you only got the new functionailty by reinstalling Office.
... apart in a VM, when necessary.
My only Windows machine (7 pro) is not connected to the Internet, and the latest install I did at work (on another machine) was WinXP, because of old driver issues.
Apart from that, people around here only use Linux or Mac. And Android or iOS. The discussions turn more around Debian -vs- Ubuntu -vs- SuSE -vs- others.
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