Microsoft Sets Date To End The support For Windows 7

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Prepared to bid adieu to Microsoft Windows 7!

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is finally preparing to end the support for Windows 7 – the most popular Windows OS in the last decade. The company is planning to do so by January 14, 2020. That means Microsoft Windows 7, along with Office 2010, will stop receiving software and security updates, including the critical ones.

Microsoft is will relay this message to the concerned customers by redirecting them to a link which will encourage them to either upgrade to Windows 10 or go for a better PC. The warning notifications for the above are meant to be dispatched next month, according to Matt Barlow, CVP of Windows.

The notifications, however, won’t be compulsory, allowing users to choose the ‘remind me later‘ option if required. But will it be as smooth as they want it to be? Let us look at that in a bit more detail.

Bid Adieu Windows 7: The Most Popular OS

Despite being released back in July 2015, Windows 10 was able to beat the market share of Windows 7 only recently. The former was able to have a desktop OS market share 39.22% in December 2018, as compared to the 36.9% of the latter. The install base speaks indicates the popularity of Windows 7, an operating system which was released almost 10 years ago! Hence, crossing this milestone was indeed important for Windows 10. Moreover, it couldn’t have come at a better time, with the support ending for it in a year’s time.

However, 36.9% of the market still represents more than a third of the entire desktop OS market. The success of Windows 7 is proving it difficult for its subsequent version to reach its goal of 1 billion users. Currently sitting at more than 800 million users, Windows 10 is just falling short of the mark set by the company to be reached in 3 years.

It seems like the people using Windows 7 are going to stick to using that for a long time even after the support stops. Moving such a large portion of the market from one OS to another doesn’t look possible in a short span of time. As of Feb 2019, Windows 10 has a 40.3% of desktop OS market share as opposed to the 38.4% of Windows 7.

windows OS market share

However, the notifications to be released next month will help towards speeding up the adoption process. We can expect a significant decrease in the Windows 7 market share by the end of the year. But it is unlikely that all of the concerned 38% of the market is going to upgrade themselves.

Regardless, both these OS versions hold about 80% share of the entire desktop OS market. The dominance by Microsoft here is unquestionable, taking into consideration the fact that the customers have no competent alternatives other than their products.

On the flip side, the one aspect where Microsoft failed in terms of OS in the smartphone industry. If Windows 10 had any presence in the global smartphone OS market, it would have crossed its target of 1 billion long back. However, Microsoft doesn’t really need to venture there again at this point in time.

Riding high on the success of Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven Cloud offerings, Microsoft ended 2018 with the tag of the world’s third most valuable company. It might just get better if Windows 10 does hit a billion devices after the notifications get dispatched. Considering 4 out of 10 Windows OS users are hooked to Windows 7, it would be interesting to see how many of them really upgrade themselves to Windows 10 or prefer to stick with that for some more time, risking themselves in the era of cybercrime, privacy threats and hacking.

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