Comment by guidedlight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guidedlight | Hacker News Reader

Windows adoption is largely driven by corporations.

Most corporates align on a common policy of migration to every second major Windows release following this pattern:

Windows NT 4, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10

With Windows 2000, Windows Vista, and Windows 11 skipped.

Which is a shame as these same corporates who have fleets of Apple Mac computers normally migrate annually about 6-9 months after each major annual MacOS release.

I hypothesis the reason may be that Windows upgrades tend to be major IT projects with historically large testing and remediation activities, whereas MacOS upgrades are small, introducing a small number of feature enhancements. New Mac computers also are only compatible with the latest MacOS release further encouraging rapid corporate adoption.

> Which is a shame as these same corporates who have fleets of Apple Mac computers normally migrate annually about 6-9 months after each major annual MacOS release.

Those have a much longer support period, though. MacOS 11 works on any Mac from 2013 (or occasionally 2014) on. Windows 11 appears to require at least a Kaby Lake processor; those mostly showed up in mid 2017. Many corporates would still have Skylake or earlier machines knocking around; my work machine is a Skylake MacBook Pro, and that's in a large _software_ company.

This is particularly a problem because Intel has been in a bit of a rut; there's not that much difference between a Skylake chip from 2016 and an Ice Lake one from 2020, particularly on the desktop, so there are a lot of Skylakes still in circulation.

Which is all a bit odd, really; traditionally it has been the opposite. But as Apple's support periods have grown, Microsoft's seem to have shrunk.

Rather a shame, as Win2k was a reasonably stable, low-bullshit release.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI. Explorer was a hot mess, often crashing within the first hour of a clean install, but yeah, Win2k was a fine version.

I've never come across a corporate who's policy is to skip every other release.

You forgot Windows 8. Don't worry, so did everyone else - probably for the best.

They forgot it in the list of skipped Windows versions, but didn't forget to skip it from the list of used versions!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com