A little over a year ago, I was reading about how windows 10 would be the last OS upgrade that I will ever need. It is understandable that Microsoft wishes that people switch to their latest operating system and those darn users are reticent to change. Especially when Microsoft provides an operating system that already works up to the users expectations.
This is a fairly intractable situation. Make an operating system that people don’t like and they will moan about how terrible it is, words gets around and nobody buys it; the alternative is that you make an operating system that works fine and people don’t want to upgrade to the next new operating system 3 years later.
An interesting solution to the whole upgrade treadmill was the mention of Windows as a service. It simply would continuously update and upgrade to remain current. No more new releases of windows. It sounds like a pretty big order. How will they bring out a new file system formats? Do they simply convert it when that feature is released? What if the disk is virtually full? Do they support one file system standard for machines installed today and another in three years?
Yet, as a developer I know how nice it is to leave something old behind and re-design it from scratch. Similar arguments could be made about changes to the GUI or driver model.
Is Windows 10 is as good as it gets. No more innovation possible?
Maybe, but in January I was reading an article that in the future only the most critical security fixes will be made available for those (windows 7 and 8.1) platforms. An even more bold statement suggests that the operating system will be closer tied the the hardware.
Going forward, the company says that using the latest generation processors will always require the latest generation operating system.
This seems contradictory to me. This is the last operating system that I will need, well, unless my machine gets old. If that happens the critical patches will be installed up to the dates that have been promised but no longer. If you are a windows 7 user you should see these patches until January 14, 2020.
That is a long time but it sounds like it would be really locking the company into a single code base that acts different and has different levels of security depending on the age of the machine. It is really no different than the situation that Microsoft has now but they will have to keep it forever. No reprieve of a new code base for the new Windows N.
I personally hope to have a new machine in 2020 anyway. Perhaps it will be a 7gz 16 core with 500Tb SSD storage. I can really word-process on a machine like that.
