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Comment by dom0 | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 still has about 50 % market share. That's more than just some holdouts, over all.

In my experience much of that is corporations which are always slow to switch. Almost all the people who buy windows machines I know have gotten windows 10

Look at the lifespan of a corporate pc. 3-5 years before warranty, risk management end and they’re replaced. Often the OS is not upgraded in between. Plus Corp software that depends on everything down to how obscure system dll versions. So we are looking at 2020 before most are migrated probably

The enterprises I've known have upgraded en mass and 3-5 year hardware cycles are ... generous.

I was guessing the 3-5, for us it 3 and 4(3 laptops/4 desktops). Do you mean the replace HW faster or slower?

It depends on size, we have over 60,000 computers and before End of Support for XP we moved to 7 in under a year. That was a kick in the butt and Win10 has been far quicker. It's the standard and almost everything deployed gets it, but there are always stranglers who are slower. You have to take from other projects to do a mass upgrade and it can be a hard sell when it will happen on the systems renewal schedule anyways.

I mean slower, much slower.

You can't actually buy new copies of Windows 7 anymore, I don't think, so that doesn't exactly say much.

And well, in this case, corporations aren't just slow to switch, they're also still investigating, if they can actually even use Windows 10 due to the increased telemetry.

For many companies, deploying Windows 10 would mean breaking contract requirements or the law.

Just two weeks ago, the ministry for data privacy of Bavaria released a report, that hey, they can actually legally use Windows 10 Enterprise, given a list of tweaks that have to be made in each deployment.

And then the addendum was that new privacy laws are going to become active next year, so at that point, these results are completely irrelevant, again. I expect the next report on Windows 10 being usable (or not) in two years from now.

The magic version is "Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB", which provides a whole bunch of toggles not available in the regular version.

Despite saying IOT in the name it's really intended for POS systems.

Gp was speaking specifically about some holdouts they know.

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