Microsoft has announced that current Windows 7 corporate and institutional users can keep using the OS and pay for expanded security update through January 2023.
The news seems to be a backward step for the tech giant which has been quite aggressively pushing its newest Windows 10 OS released in July 2015 to everybody for a 'modern desktop'.
"A modern desktop with Windows 10 and Office 365 gives you the most productive, most secure experience, helping you save money and gain control," said the company's Windows 10 latest sales page.
In a recent blog post titled "Helping customers shift to a modern desktop", Microsoft announced that it will start charging Windows 7 customers a monthly fee from January 14th, 2020, if they still want to keep their computers safe. The pricing for these Extended Security Updates (ESU) will keep on increasing between 2020 and 2023. The more the user tries to hold on this old operating system, the costlier it will be.
To make the upgrades to Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus by enterprises more effective, Microsoft likewise listed cloud-based tools for analytics, application similarity for updates, and additional deployment flexibility with servicing and support changes.
Microsoft's Windows 7 was first released in July 2009. Almost a decade in existence, the operating system claimed popularity among Windows users for its innovativeness, compatibility and support, and its unique aero design, which was a massively efficient upgrade from its predecessor Windows Vista, which was anything, but a blunder.
Stating the effectiveness of Windows 10, the blog post said, "Windows 10 is the most compatible Windows operating system ever and using millions of data points from customer diagnostic data and the Windows Insider validation process, we've found that 99 percent of apps are compatible with new Windows updates. So you should generally expect that apps that work on Windows 7 will continue to work on Windows 10 and subsequent feature updates."
This move to charge a hefty fees for security software service may turn out to be a negative publicity for Microsoft, which has been criticised in the past too for being greedy. Also pushing unwilling consumers to upgrade to Windows 10 from the company's point of view may not be fully plausible. Around 40 per cent of computers in the world still run their operations on the older but a friendly version of Windows 7.
