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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

I think for Microsoft the cost of maintaining old releases outweighs the backfire caused by the forced upgrades.

This. As painful as it may be in the short term it will be beneficial in the long term. What MS is desparatly trying to avoid is having a critical mass of users who stick with win7 from here on out like what happened with XP. After dealing with that for years they want to cut off the appendix before it makes them sick this time around and who can blame them.

When some big 0day hits 7 all those consumers and small/medium businesses who turned a surprise win10 upgrade into "well we may as well go with 10 on everything at this point" will probably stop complaining.

Microsoft's can wish that everybody updated to the current version, but fantasies that aren't based in reality usually remain a fantasy.

There are a large variety of reasons to not upgrade, or upgrade later. Pretending these use cases don't exist or that they should ignore their own requirements just because Microsoft (or any other vendor) would find it convenient is a demonstration of how little they care about their users.

This push to force everyone into a monoculture has been so successful (lol), it has increased[1] the market share of Windows 7*.

> who can blame them

Their customers that expected a well engineered product, but are instead handed an ultimatum to accept new features, new bugs, new incompatibilities, and an order to upgrade at the vendor's convenience.

The point is to server the customer's needs, not the vendor's convenience.

[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qp...

The market is going towards increased sophistication and incremental updates for operating systems. At the same time you have to be able to compete with low cost or free alternatives. Pretending that you can do that, without limiting the number of versions you have to maintain, is worse in the long-term.

Well then they'd be wise to offer free Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 7 users forever instead of charging for it after July 29th 2016. And yes, I know they have to make money, but Apple hasn't charged for an OS upgrade in ~3 (soon to be 4) years now and that is their competition. If they were serious about getting people to use Windows 10 they'd let people stay on 7 until their compatibility concerns are fixed.

I'll ignore the Apple comment since everyone knows the reason for that. What we don't currently know (I think) is if Microsoft will charge a premium for upgrades after the 29th. From what I've read they haven't announced upgrade pricing which means it either won't have an upgrade version (i.e. you pay full price) or it will be a dirt cheap and they won't announce it in hope they get more Win10 installs before the expire date.

> The free upgrade offer will end on July 29 and we want to make sure you don’t miss out. After July 29th, you’ll be able to continue to get Windows 10 on a new device, or purchase a full version of Windows 10 Home for $119.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/05/05/windo...

It seems there will be no other upgrade path than paying $119. But of course it's not unlikely that they will be forced to extend the offer or give some other option.

From the attached article:

«The free Windows 10 upgrade offer ends on July 29, after which you'll be charged £99/€135/$119 for Windows 10 Home or £190 for Windows 10 Pro.»

The upgrade costs are in line with historic upgrade costs for Windows.

Indeed I know the reason for it. However the fact remains that Windows cannot be both more expensive and worse, which in my opinion it is.

Yea, I have been thinking of selling Windows to a non profit foundation for a while now.

They will continue to do security updates for Win7 for years. I think what is happening is that MS realizes that Windows version fragmentation would get more expensive in the longer term. Win10 does have LTSB, but limited to enterprise customers.

I've got a fairly old Win7 machine, and it just works. Quite happy to do something else in 2020 when win7 maintenance ends, but not now. Too many horror stories, and no compelling reasons to upgrade.

Something that might have helped that cause is skipping the behavior which resulted in widespread news stories saying Windows 10 was sending all sorts of potentially privacy-damaging information to Microsoft and you couldn't turn that off.

(Except in Enterprise. There you can turn it off. But Microsoft won't sell that to individuals.)

Not true. MS will support Windows 7 until 2020 and Windows 8.1 until at 2023. (security updates aka "extended support") And Windows 10 has a official 10-year support lifecycle, = 2025. http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-commits-to-10-year-su... and https://support.microsoft.com/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-f...

Sure, I don't like the direction that windows is taking in terms of privacy, having to deal with compatibility issues or the disregard for people on limited connections. But that isn't worse that the flaws of other operating systems. The basic premise is the same, I use windows because it's offers the best value to me in terms of ecosystem. Windows 10 is probably the best engineered windows yet, it will offer goodies as ubuntu on windows and I do my part to curb fragmentation. "The devil you know" attitude is something that has plagued things like Internet infrastructure for a long time, with dire consequences.

I do get why people don't want to update in some cases though, but I have a harder time to seeing a good reason for the backlash.

I actively avoid Windows now after Windows 10, I was ambivalent before. It's unfortunate that Linux on desktop has kinda stagnated, as if they got their act together they could really take over with the behavior Microsoft is pushing in 10.

you should try Fedora 24.

The best opportunities, Windows XP being retired and Apple neglecting their pro users, have already past. With Google entering the market there is even less holes in the market today for other Linux variants.

Oddly it seems that browser tracking sites are reading ChromeOS as Linux. Because there seems to have been a recent uptick in Linux computers registered.

Is Apple really neglecting their pro users? I'm a pro user and after three years of using a Mac I'm just way way more productive than I ever was after ten years of Windows usage. Every time I see something cool in Windows 10 (like Linux subsystem, PowerShell package manager, etc) that might make me switch back I remember how shitty the control panel is, how cluttered the interface is, how bad the system search is, how poorly designed everything else seems. And yes, I know they're working on these things but the problem is OS X has had them for nearly 15 years now and Microsoft is still figuring it out. What is OS X/MacOS missing for pro users on the software side? I'll admit the hardware could use an update (likely later this year) but I'm pretty content with the way everything works in software right now. With macOS 10.12 we'll be getting an amazing new file system too.

I have to use Windows 10 for CAD software and sometimes playing games and it's inarguably the best Windows so far. Unfortunately, that's not saying much.

Yes, my understanding is that they did (and to some degree continue to), especially before the new Mac Pro. We're talking about users that spend 99% of their time in an application suite.

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