Microsoft confirms Windows 7 sales have ended, but Windows 7 PCs can still sell

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/12/09/microsoft-confirms-windows-7-sales-ended-october-30-pcs-windows-7-dont-yet-end-sales-date/

by hackhackhack • 13 years ago

26 43 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

zspade• 13 years ago

Windows 7 met a much better response from the market, and at least the last time I checked(August) was still selling faster than windows 8! The entire windows 8 release has felt forced and unnatural. Personally I still cannot get used to the awkward interface that can't decide whether it wants to be a tablet or desktop OS. This is a poor decision on Microsoft's part.

manojlds• 13 years ago

If they didn't do this a section would blame MS for another XP like situation.

thatthatis• 13 years ago

XP like situations come from releasing half-baked UIs after fully baked UIs.

Vista had some really good ideas, executed poorly. Win8 has some good ideas, executed poorly.

By all measures, Win9 should be a great OS. MS just has a nasty habbit of releasing experimental software as if it were ready for production.

kerpal• 13 years ago

I was just reading an article yesterday stating that Windows 7 had twice the growth rate in market share of Windows 8. Pretty dumb of Microsoft to alienate their customers but I suppose its nothing new.

ds9• 13 years ago

"Did you buy that computer?" - "No, I found another one that had Windows 7 instead of 8" - "Oh good deal!" -- overheard in line at a convenience store. Nearby, computer shop advertising on a big sign that you could still get Win 7 instead of 8. Anecdotes aren't data, I know, but my experience has been consistent with the consensus of rants online.

Now MS is "doubling down" on Win 8 instead of making concessions to those who need an interface that works well with keyboard and passive monitor. One might say, this proves it wasn't just Ballmer running the company into the ground!

Seriously, what is the chance that MS will come up with something better liked in another version a year or two in future?

It may be a tired cliché now to talk of Linux for PCs becoming mass-market, but things are looking better and better for this prospect. In particular, (a) nice noob-friendly GUIs (b) hardware support better than ever and (c) games finally coming along (thanks Valve/Steam).

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

instead of making concessions to those who need an interface that works well with keyboard and passive monitor

What concessions are they missing? It's still the exact same damn shell when you drop down to Desktop mode. I use it all the time, on 3 different mouse&keyboard machines.

mariusmg• 13 years ago

Good. Windows 8(.1) is a better OS (faster, nice UI improvements). Time to move on.

It's a bit amazing that 4 Microsoft OSes have nice big chunks of the overall market.

anonymoushn4• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, a bug introduced in Windows 8 causes about 60% of the Windows apps I want to use (by time spent using them) to crash. The current workaround is to not use Windows 8 or to disable one's sound device.

romanovcode• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, if you don't use Windows 8 you won't be able to run those apps in the first place.

If you're talking about Metro apps, of course.

trimbo2• 13 years ago

What's the bug? Is the bug up on connect.microsoft.com?

FireBeyond• 13 years ago

What an odd metric. By that description, one singular app that you spend most of your time in it would meet that criteria, but to read it, it sounds like there's a whole slew of issues.

brownbat• 13 years ago

What happens if Microsoft never has another Windows 7?

Will everyone run 7 well past its support lifecycle? Will Linux win the desktop? Will we get a new round of commercial OS competition? Will Windows 9 try to roll back to a more traditional desktop OS?

I think these questions will be determined by what businesses do, being the intractable giant footprint of desktop usage (with apologies to SteamOS).

Microsoft is offering extended support for XP, but at discouragement prices. 7 will probably be similar, so "just stick on 7 forever" is out.

Commercial OS competition seems an unlikely possibility. It'd be hard to attract new entrants when those currently best positioned to exploit the market are either near monopolies or free. It's too bad, more competition in the space would probably produce some really great ideas.

Big companies do learn from their mistakes, even after years of heading in the wrong direction. There's just so much inertia in capital. IBM and Apple have shown that you can coast for a long time on bad decisions then make a startling recovery. Sometimes this takes a massive cultural shift though, or visionary new leadership. It could happen, and probably will eventually. We're on a tight timeframe though, so I put the chances of that happening before Windows 9's release at only around 20%.

That only leaves the possibility that some Linux variant will take over, maybe one designed to really cater to small to medium sized business owners. MS Office probably keeps that from ever happening though. (And I can't feel that comfortable about any line of analysis that ends with, "Linux will take over the desktop.")

I've run out of options. Maybe 2015 will be the year of Android on the desktop.

EDIT: Or Apple, sure.

mmorris• 13 years ago

I'm not an expert, but I was under the impression that Windows 8.1 is already rolling back some of the changes from Win 7 -> 8. I'd imagine MS will do a bit more of that and fix some bugs, and for the most part people will just get used to Win 8.

Though I'd love if any of the competitors gained some marketshare out of this. More Linux on the desktop would be a good thing.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

Windows 8.1 just eased up on a few of the more extreme UI decisions. They aren't making it into Win 7 again. The Start Menu, for example, is still Metro. All they did was add a button where the start menu used to be that opens the Metro UI, allowing users to open the start menu without swiping or using the Win key.

dijit• 13 years ago

They added a button to take you to metro where the start menu used to be.

that's the only change I've heard of.

davidgerard2• 13 years ago

The interesting thing is that Vista and 7 are substantially identical - same interface, benchmark about the same ... but people typically tried out Vista in 1GB and 7 in 2GB.

And businesses I saw moved from XP to 7 mostly so they could use more than 3GB memory.

YMMV of course. But as a parallel, remember that the Edsel is famous as Ford's greatest failure, and its followup the Comet as one of Ford's greatest hits ... but the Comet was a reskinned rebranding of what was going to be the next Edsel.

qq66• 13 years ago

Architecturally Vista and 7 might be similar but a lot of software fails in strange ways in Vista and not in 7. It's now worse because nobody tests against Vista.

fournm• 13 years ago

The other difference between most people's first attempts with Vista and 7 is that by the time of 7's release, even Nvidia had cleaned up their driver situation (and Creative, the other main offender, seemed to basically vanish as a company you'd need something from).

djpowell• 13 years ago

Vista had some horrible graphics performance, by disabling 2D graphics acceleration, and in keeping shadow copies of graphics buffers in RAM. There is some explanation here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2d-windows-gdi,review-31795-7....

codeflo• 13 years ago

Vista also changed a lot with the service packs. People's impression of Vista was Vista SP0, which was slow (horrible file copy performance) and in my opinion barely usable (UAC prompts every five seconds). SP1/2 fixed a lot of those, so the jump from Vista SP2 to Windows 7 was a lot less dramatic.

wvenable• 13 years ago

Vista was rushed out; it's effectively the beta version of Windows 7. Going back to Vista after using 7, you can see where the UI is sort of a half-way between XP and 7. There were many performance and usability enhancements made to 7.

trimbo2• 13 years ago

What happens if Microsoft never has another Windows 7?

Similar things were said during the Vista era. "What happens if Microsoft never has another XP?"

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

Yes, but they got "another XP". They are just discontinuing it now, and they give no signs that they'll make another one.

Anyway, you can't compare the magnitude of the problems of Vista with the ones of Windows 8.x.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

Corporations don't want to upgrade operating systems at the same pace as Microsoft releases them anyway. Hell, there are companies that are only just now finally upgrading or decommissioning RHEL4, and every release of RHEL is 100% targeted at corporate users. (RHEL4 initial release: 2005. RHEL5 initial release: 2007)

Personally, I bet if Microsoft only focuses on making a good "commercial" OS on the "tock", it could still work out fine. Then they can use the "tick" to be creative and go after "private" use, and the corporations won't care.

grecy• 13 years ago

My company (a smallish telco) is just putting the final touches on the plan to move from XP->Win7 in Q1 2014 (that means late 2014).

mhurron• 13 years ago

companies that are only just now finally upgrading or decommissioning RHEL4

RHEL 4 is supported until 2015. Starting it's replacement now is pretty normal.

nilsbunger2• 13 years ago

I think it'll play out like the XP-->Win7 transition: consumers are almost all on Win7+, because XP hasn't been sold bundled on a PC in over 3 years. Businesses are still on XP (they have "downgrade rights" to install XP) and are dragging their feet because it's a painful migration.

So I think businesses will be on Win7 for a LONG time, until commercial support expires. That would mean at least thru 2017 or 2018. And businesses will pressure MS to maintain support even longer, because they "just switched" to Win7.

I don't see this being a big win for Linux or Mac though either. The drag on upgrades in businesses is because of compatibility and training issues. A switch to Linux / Mac is 100x more disruptive to a business than a switch from XP --> Win 7.

The real disruption isn't linux or mac, it's iOS and Android. I'm convinced that it'll be easier for tablets to grow a keyboard and some multitasking, than for PCs to "slim down" while maintaining compatibility with normal Windows applications.

digikata• 13 years ago

I wonder if there are any Linux distributions which will try to pickup Win XP & 7 business users with wine compatibility for old apps. Combine that with a app store with a good core range of business applications and you might be able to get access to the small business market.

Silhouette• 13 years ago

What happens if Microsoft never has another Windows 7?

I can see a few plausible results, but none of them looks pretty for Microsoft.

One option is that the cloud (or IMHO more likely in the long run, private cloud) trend continues, and browsers and mobile operating systems approach the level where they can host applications that compete with heavyweight desktop apps. At this point, server and infrastructure providers win, general software companies move to a client-server model and do OK, and Microsoft die because Windows and Office are finished.

If relatively thin clients aren't up to the job fast enough, or if things like security and privacy concerns start to take precedence, then there's a void in the desktop space. Apple could make a strong play for it, with the resources and existing platform to build on; how many business laptops aren't Apple boxes these days? Linux distributions aimed squarely at non-technical users could rise, with some interesting possibilities created by the likes of Valve. And of course there is always Microsoft's biggest traditional competitor on the desktop: pirated copies of Windows versions people actually like. In these kinds of scenarios, the alternative platforms probably all win to some extent, general software companies might struggle a bit with portability and start specialising in different platforms again (particularly if we wind up with an "app store" model for serious desktop applications) but will do OK, and Microsoft die because (legally obtained) Windows is a shadow of its former self and Office's main selling point -- that everyone else is using it -- probably ceases to apply.

Basically, the only software developer that really loses out if Microsoft don't produce another Windows XP or Windows 7 is Microsoft, and if that happens, I see no likely scenario that ends well for them. For everyone else, the interesting questions are mostly about how diverse/competitive/specialised the alternative platforms become.

mark-r• 13 years ago

PC life cycles are lengthening as Moore's Law stops delivering improvements that matter to everyday use. The OS must have matching life cycles or the disconnect will be unpleasant to say the least. Microsoft is already losing the consumer to tablets and such, they shouldn't piss off their corporate clients too.

Mithaldu• 13 years ago

It's like they want people to pirate Windows.

winslow2• 13 years ago

I use Win7 and Win8 at work doing development/programming. Win8 isn't as bad as I initially thought, though for development it is annoying because fully disabling UAC for some dev stuff killed all metro apps. This past weekend I used linux as my main OS and honestly kept forgetting I was on linux compared to windows. Personally I think my next desktop will be pure Linux (Mint) and maybe a Windows VirtualBox as everything I need Maya, Steam, Dev Tools except Adobe CS is available on Linux.

Will this be the year of the Linux desktop? No probably not but if Microsoft doesn't have another Win7 success it could be the opening Linux needs to get more than your typical tech savvy person to give linux a try. SteamOS on Steam Machines shows some promise as well to introduce people to linux.

tracker1• 13 years ago

My last hardware upgrade, I put linux on it... which was great, but when I added in my old hard drives, for some reason grub wouldn't boot to the "right" drive after an update. (Ubuntu 13.04) ... grub would come up, but no idea how to fix it after the fact. Generally speaking, if I could get to NTLDR on a drive, it would boot windows installed on that same drive.

I am liking ubuntu+xbmc on my htpc... first time in a while I've tried linux in that setting and it supported all my media without issue. Was finally willing to try after getting a stand alone bluray player. Which isn't too much of an issue, but was the biggest thing keeping my htpc in windows.

Have a cubox-i4pro coming, and will see how that works for the same chores in the bedroom.

winslow2• 13 years ago

I had a problem once with a hardware raid setup and grub installing to the wrong place. I figured that was just my lack of linux knowledge back then.

Oh yes, I absolutely love using Mint+xbmc with my HTPC(s). I'm also excited for the valve steam machine controller with touch pads for both games but also general browsing.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

For those who despise the Windows 8 user interface: you can make it behave like Windows 7 by installing "Classic Shell" (it's free):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Shell

Microsoft confirms Windows 7 sales have ended, but Windows 7 PCs can still sell

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