Re: Time to rethink
Under the hood Windows 8 has improvements over Windows 7. For example, its hypervisor is far better, and can take advantage of newer CPU virtualization support. Sure, you can use another one, but if your OS comes with a good embedded hypervisor, why not? Especially since they are a pretty intrusive kind of software.
There's also better support for high DPI displays, and they'll become more common soon.
As SSD disks becomes mainstream, the OS needs to change how the disk is used to maximize its life, or performance.
What about DIrectX 12? Will be it retrofitted to 7 or will it be an 8+ exclusive? You may not need it, or you may...
There's a difference between supporting new hw somehow - i.e. using SATA disks pretending they were plain older ATA ones - or exploiting its capabilities fully. New hw may present itself to older OS in a compatible way, but you're going to renounce to use it fully. Does it make sense to spend $$$$ in new hw, and use it only in a legacy compatible mode?
Also, new release may start to drop old legacy features for many reasons, including security - and support new standards as well.
Meanwhile, some applications start to remove support for older operating systems, XP and Vista. For example the latest Canon camera utilities don't support them. If you buy one of the new cameras announced at Photokina (i.e. the EOS 7D MK II or the Powershot G7 X), they are supported only by the latest utility releases (and some are 64-bit only) - if you have one of the older OS, or you upgrade, or you have to renounce to use their software. Lightroom already no longer supports older OSes.
It's not always the OS to drive the adoption of new applications, sometimes it's the other way round. You may need a newer application because it does support something you really need, just to find it won'r run on older OSes. Supporting XP and Vista along 7 and 8 is becoming more and more time consuming, and since XP is EOLed, and Vista has a tiny share of the market, expect more and more new releases dropping support for them. If you're ok with older software it won't hurt you much, but if you need newer ones - and you could, if you need to support something newer, you will need a newer OS.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
