Windows 7 versus Windows 10: Here comes the final showdown

[DR_ADHAM]

 

 

                  It's now less than a year until Windows 7 goes out of mainstream support; after January 14, 2020, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or support for PCs running Windows 7 -- unless you want to pay extra, of course.

 

This is a big issue for many companies: while Windows 7 is long in the tooth (it went on sale back in October 2009), it's much loved -- at least, as much as a PC operating system can be loved -- and is still widely used.

 

Indeed, even though Windows 10 has been around since late 2015, it's only in the last month or so that general usage of Windows 10 has finally overtaken Windows 7. According to Microsoft there are 1.5 billion devices running Windows, with more than 700 million running Windows 10. But that means there are hundreds of millions of devices running Windows 7, with that support deadline looming.

 

Microsoft is certainly keen for businesses to upgrade, touting the security of Windows 10 over Windows 7 as a good reason to make the move. It's also keen to get as many users onto Windows 10 as possible because that will help it build momentum behind Windows-as-a-Service, which means regular feature updates rather than massive upgrade projects every few years.

 

But enterprises, which are often cautious about new technology, will have noted Microsoft's buggy recent Windows 10 upgrades and will worry about the impact on their infrastructure.

 

So what happens now?

Andrew Hewitt, a tech analyst at Forrester Research, says the past two years has already seen a massive migration and push towards Windows 10.

According to Forrester's survey of infrastructure decision-makers, 56 percent of company-issued PCs are currently running Windows 10 -- up eight percent from last year, and 18 percent from the year before. "This shift is happening at a quick rate, but as you can see, there's still quite a ways to go before everyone is shifted over to Windows 10," says Hewitt.

 

So why hasn't everyone updated yet? One reason is that businesses have legacy apps that aren't compatible with Windows 10 and they don't know what to do about it, or they have not yet done their application compatibility testing -- a key migration milestone. Some are concerned about the frequency of Windows updates and don't have the processes in place to adequately respond, and some are concerned about cost.

 

"All these things work together to keep organizations on Windows 7," Hewitt says.

 

Hewitt predicts that even by the 2020 date, we won't be seeing full Windows 10 adoption, as some organisations are comfortable waiting longer before they make these changes. There are also some non-standard devices, like ruggedized devices, that will run Windows 7 for quite some time, he says.

 

"I'm optimistic about the vast majority of organizations making the move by 2020, but it certainly won't be 100 percent. Some will consider other alternatives -- like ChromeOS, for example -- which we've seen increasingly adopted in enterprise use cases," says Hewitt.

 

A few years ago, getting customers to shift to the newest version of Windows might have been a make-or-break project for Microsoft, but it's no longer just the Windows company these days.

 

In its quarterly company results, Windows is now unceremoniously lumped in with Surface, gaming and search revenue under More Personal Computing. For Microsoft, the priority is its other two revenue baskets -- Productivity and Business Processes (which includes Dynamics and Office 365) and Intelligent Cloud -- both of which, while slightly smaller by revenue, are growing faster than the group that includes Windows.  

 

That's probably just as well; PC shipments have been in decline for seven -- yes, seven -- years now. Consumers are buying fewer PCs (40 percent of them, down from 49 percent just five years ago), which means that PCs -- and Windows -- are increasingly mainly a business tool. As Microsoft largely missed the boat on smartphones, tablets and wearables, aiming at productivity and the cloud is a wise choice.

 

That's not to say the PC isn't still important: it's the gateway to many other products like Office 365, and to a lesser extent to Microsoft's cloud offerings. And despite claims that Windows would give way to Chromebooks (or, even further into the distant past, Linux on the desktop), Microsoft's OS has proved remarkably resilient. Deciding what to do about the demise of Windows 7 will be a headache and create plenty of work for IT, but the reality is that Windows is not as vital as it once was, thanks to the rise of the browser, the cloud and new device types, all of which mean that the desktop is no longer the only option for productivity.

 

SOURCE

[LeeSmithG]

I moved on to Windows 10 Pro and apart from a couple of issues, it's all good.

 

Companies are lazy and tight-fisted.

 

They should get with the times, I am sure soon a new version of Windows will hit the retail shelves, I will probably upgrade then.

 

I didn't like 8 or 8.1, usually, I am there front of the queue when the new release is ready, amazon.co.uk deliver it that day, of course, being metaphorical.

[DR_ADHAM]

• Many of these companies have a large data base including a lot of outputs produced on Windows 7 that may face compatibility issues when transferred to a newer OS
• Many of their resources are working fine with Windows 7 and shifting to Windows 10 will cost them upgrading these resources and consequently costing them more money
• Time is a very valuable element in production and many of these companies cannot sacrifice the time consumed by the upgrade processes

So, it's a matter of saving MONEY, TIME and EFFORTS.

And all these items cannot be ignored (It's not a matter of laziness).

 

[luisam]

On 1/22/2019 at 9:16 AM, DR_ADHAM said:

That's probably just as well; PC shipments have been in decline for seven -- yes, seven -- years now. Consumers are buying fewer PCs (40 percent of them, down from 49 percent just five years ago), which means that PCs -- and Windows -- are increasingly mainly a business tool

 

I guess that PC market has been saturating progressively with more and more powerful PCs and laptops. Standard equipment using up to 16 Gb RAM, over 2 TB HDD , 1 TB SSD, 5.5 GHz 6 Gb graphic cards, i9 processors make increasingly powerful devices and a user might decide that to write his documents, connect to Facebook, download and store his personal videos and photos and stream videos he won't need something more powerful than his current equipment. I know people using 10+ years old computers and are quite happy about  it with no intention to buy a new one while the old is still running.

22 hours ago, jbleck said:

Many lower level employees are struggling with defective or too slow machines.

 

Just yesterday I happened to visit the office of a friend; he has a small administration company. The computers used by his employees are about 6 years-old models, he has a full featured HP laptop bought some months ago and the receptionist girl works with a computer running a Celeron processor, Windows 98SE, a 13" CRT monitor with a 2 Gb drive and an application she uses only to register incoming calls and visits. Has no internet connection. When I commented to this fellow that I found this equipment quite funny he told me that they had two similar computers to replace eventually the one she was using. Honestly, I didn't find her "struggling" with that old computer. All she has to do is input name and the object of visit.

[straycat19]

5 hours ago, DR_ADHAM said:

According to Forrester's survey of infrastructure decision-makers

 

I conducted a survey of IT decision-makers and 100% of those surveyed are going to stick with Windows 7 for at least another 5 years.  Of course, like Forrester, I selected the personnel I was going to survey to skew my results the way I wanted them.  

 

1 hour ago, luisam said:

I know people using 10+ years old computers and are quite happy about

 

I have computers I use today that are over 20 years old (1997 Dell Inspiron 3000) because it has a PCMCIA slot that is required for a specific device.  I also know there is a demand for these old computers in the scientific field for the same reason, they need a laptop with a PCMCIA capability running Windows 98.  I also have PCs running Windows 98 (built in 1999) and Windows XP (built in 2002-3) because the software on them will not run on newer systems.  I also have Iomega ZIP drives in both parallel and SCSI.

 

5 hours ago, LeeSmithG said:

I moved on to Windows 10 Pro and apart from a couple of issues, it's all good.

 

So you like being Microsoft's beta tester.  Good for you.  I prefer running stable systems and stable and Windows 10 are not on the same planet.  I have 47 computers in my home (not counting the 'toys' like Ocktel, GPD, and Raspberry Pi) and none of them run Windows 10 though it may have originally been installed on some of them.  They all run Windows 98, XP, 7, 8.1, or various Linux distros.  All of which ARE stable and have no issues.  I have tested/experimented with various Windows 10 builds in VMs and find Windows 10 to be exactly what it is, bloated crapware.  It is not fit for use by companies who care about security and stability in their IT system.  

[jbleck]

4 hours ago, DR_ADHAM said:

So, it's a matter of saving MONEY, TIME and EFFORTS.

And all these items cannot be ignored (It's not a matter of laziness).

it's only money and greed or ignorance/lack of care...

 

Companies should get on with the times and they should invest in new equipment.

They replaced people with machines and they think it's a one time investment. Old machines are everywhere because they are reliable (hardware wise). Most companies are buying only mouses, keyboards and some decent monitors for the front desk and the CiC (commander-in-chief... which doesn't even uses it most times)... Many lower level employees are struggling with defective or too slow machines.

[banned]

Wait, what? But I haven't even gone to Vista yet.... Are you meaning to tell me that web sites are supposed to load in less than a half-hour?

[Bell]

The hospital where i work is migrating every single system toward Windows 10. We set up a special team who does that job. It is very time consuming for the "special" computer. Other ones we can image hunderds at onece. But we still have to do something like 1500 pc's to get everything updated to win10. The reason we waited for it was the fact of some issues using citrix, sccm and some other programs. But it seems to be stable at this point right now.

[jbleck]

On 1/22/2019 at 4:31 PM, luisam said:

All she has to do is input name and the object of visit.

Can't she just use a smartphone or tablet?

Isn't that Celeron power consuming for nothing?

[Karlston]

On 1/23/2019 at 3:46 AM, straycat19 said:

I prefer running stable systems and stable and Windows 10 are not on the same planet.

 

Indeed. I suspect that's the main reason 10 is languishing at a mere 40 something per cent  despite three and a half years of Microsoft's forcing, bullying, and downright sneakiness.

 

Sure it's more than Windows 7 and the others, but given the Microsoft/Intel/AMD collusion that prevents new hardware running anything than 10, it's not surprising that 10 is slowly crawling upwards, and the others are slowly decreasing.

 

New device users have no choice. Older device users do have a choice between stability and instability, and they're overwhelmingly choosing anything except 10. Says it all really...

[luisam]

2 hours ago, jbleck said:

Isn't that Celeron power consuming for nothing?

 

Obviously, it's the 266 Mhz version of Celeron, released in 1998. It never had really too much power.  Probably by now the CPU hasn't any commercial value. At its best could run Office 2000, Autocad 2000, Adobe and some funny games like Prince of Persia, Quake, Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem... No, the receptionist was not playing any of those; guess she prefers Solitaire.

[noor]

Well, it's time to say goodbye to 7.  Good or bad, welcome 10.

[Icow]

Windows 7 users are the same as Windows XP users in the past, slow but will definitely leave it in the end.

[Taviruni]

I will use 7 until Firefox is available for it, then will go to Linux, in fact I have been trying some distros, and I liked Linux Mint.

[BimBamSmash]

On 1/22/2019 at 3:46 PM, DR_ADHAM said:

Microsoft is certainly keen for businesses to upgrade, touting the security of Windows 10 over Windows 7 as a good reason to make the move. It's also keen to get as many users onto Windows 10 as possible because that will help it build momentum behind Windows-as-a-Service, which means regular feature updates rather than massive upgrade projects every few years.

 

Exactly. But only because the future of WaaS is tied with subscriptions, for home and businesses alike.

How long from now before just about every app, game and service we use locally everyday becomes a subscription-based web app? No long form now if you ask me.