Windows 7 ~ Microsoft relents on shorter Windows 7 support decree

FYI:

Microsoft relents on shorter Windows 7 support decree

~ Aug 11, 2016 ~ Customer, OEM complaints likely led to nullification of January's mandate.

Microsoft today repudiated an early retirement date for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 support, saying that it will patch those operating systems on PCs running Intel's Skylake silicon until 2020 and 2023, respectively.

The move was a complete rollback of a January decree that Microsoft called a "clarification" of its support policy. Under the January plan, Microsoft would have ended most support for Windows 7 and Windows8.1 on July 17, 2017, if the operating systems were powering machines equipped with Intel's now-current Skylake processor family. Read more. . . . .

http://www.computerworld.com/article...rt-decree.html

That's good news and an unexpected sensible move from Microsoft, I'm betting it's more to do with OEMs than consumers.

I'd say it's a very safe bet it's from OEMs and the huge number of embedded type system suppliers, who are running hardware that quite simply won't work, or at least not without an uneconomical amount of investment on anything newer.

I know we have some diagnostic kit at work that was still being supplied new on a 4 year lease until early this year, which runs on Win7. If the support for those kind of systems was withdrawn, I'm pretty sure the suppliers would be very quickly looking at alternative options where they had more control over end of life agreements.

I've just upgraded one of my systems from w7 to w10. Lots of problems but nothing to do with Microsoft - the motherboard was 6 years old and it turned out that Intel had stopped supporting that chipset 3 years ago so no drivers officially available. That's one problem with continuing with old hardware - you might end up with something that becomes difficult to support for all sorts of reasons. I can sympathise with the OEMs who want a well-defined and never-changing product while everyone in the supply chain is following a latest-and-greatest improvement policy without telling anyone.

OEM, Original Equipment Manufacturer, in, and the start of the supply chain ;-)