The end is near for Windows 7. Microsoft announced today that it will stop providing free support for the operating system in exactly one year’s time. Free security updates will no longer be available in a year’s time, which means that the company only helps people who are willing to pay for them.
Four months ago, Microsoft announced the Windows 7 Extended Securities Updates program. No prices were known yet, Microsoft will announce this at a later date. In any case, the program offers companies the opportunity to still enjoy support for their Windows 7 devices, even after the end of the free updates.
Pay for updates
Thanks to ZDNet, we do know that companies will have to pay per device for the program. This will be available to all users of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise, who purchase software licenses in bulk. Support within the programme will start after 2020, and will last for a maximum of three years, until January 2023. That’s when the curtain really falls for the operating system. Microsoft also stops supporting Office 2010.
Changes and upgrades to technology are inevitable,” writes Microsoft Vice President Brad Anderson 365 in a blog. There has never been a better time to put everything in place to transfer your organization to a modern desktop with Microsoft 365.
Switching to Windows 10
In this way, Microsoft hopes to have even more companies switch over to Windows 10. This is the new starting point for the company, since it was launched in 2015. The idea is that Windows 10 will never get a new version again, but that it will simply get a lot of new upgrades every year.
Yet it still takes a long time to get all companies to switch to Windows 10. Today, Windows 10 is 39.2 percent of all desktops and 36.9 percent is still running on Windows 7. It wasn’t until the beginning of this month that Windows 10 was officially more popular than Windows 7, with more installations.
With an estimated 1.5 billion desktops and laptops worldwide, Windows 7 runs on 553 million devices. Chances are that by 2020, when the free support for Windows 7 really ends, there will still be a lot of devices running on it.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.