Software giant Microsoft is extending the life of its highly popular Vista product and its replacement, Windows 7.
Without making much of an announcement, Microsoft has extended support for the consumer versions of Windows 7 and Windows Vista by five years. This will mean that they will have the same lifespan of enterprise editions.
Microsoft told Computer World that it wanted to change its consumer operating system support policies, which until now had only been for five years. Business software had been supported for at least ten years with the first half in mainstream support, the second in "extended" support.
If a company is on extended support, they will get fixes if they have signed support contracts with Microsoft.
Vista's consumer editions were to be retired from support in less than two months, on 10 April, 2012, now they will be kept alive until 11 April, 2017.
Windows 7's consumer editions were to lose support on 13 January, 2015, but now it will be with us until 14 January, 2020.
Other than making things nice and even, it is not clear what Microsoft will get out of supporting Vista that long. We would have thought it would have wanted to forget the troubled operating system as a terrible dream.
What is possible is that the longer service contract will look good to those buying Windows 8. Although it is hard to see how anyone will want to be using an operating system in 2023 that they used in 2012.
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But ya know, it really boils down to functionality. There's no point in going to a lot of trouble or cost to upgrade to an OS so we can do things which we don't care to do.
As an aside, the extended life for the M$ products should reduce the migration to other OS's. Not a bad idea for M$. Maybe they figured out that deep down, we're not as stupid as their market research suggested.
I am using Windoze XP, only have to reboot it every few weeks. As stable as a rock. Some of my most used utilities date back to the 1990s (Eudora email, for example, still has its 1995 mailbox). Why would I look to replace both the applications base I have accumulated these last two decades? It does the job, mate.
And Windoze 8?? Just adopted Android, up to speed on that. Maybe it will be time to use Linux on more than just my servers...