I have Windows 10 on my home PC. Other than showing pretty pics (and always asking me if I’d like to see more like this), wtf? What is the big deal about Windows 10? What was wrong with Windows 7? And, why did MS have to hijack PCs to force a push of Windows 10? Yes, many people like myself actually DID NOW want Windows 10, but the MS gods said “thou shalt” and pushed it upon us mortals.
Bottom line? I don’t get it!
Actually Windows 10 is a minor change from Windows 8 and 8.1. And the design goal was to provide a unified operating system for desktops/laptops and mobile devices (tablets/cell phones).
Win 10 ties your computer to Microsoft. It’s as if the Satan of Redmond has taken over the soul of your computer. That said, it does work pretty well, other than the occasional blue screen of death, which they’ve replaced with a much prettier shade of blue.
And the push was to give them a uniform security platform. Microsoft is finding it expensive to have three or four versions with significant installed bases to patch. They were really trying to simply stop patching more than two versions, but adaptation of their OS tended to be on an every other cycle - if you had XP, you skipped Vista and upgraded at 7. If you had 7 you skipped 8 and they did the force with 10 - so they were patching three.
Now they’ll be able to patch two - at the most - the operating system people are moving from, and the operating system they are moving to.
Windows 7 was released in 2009 so what was wrong with it is that it’s seven years old. It’s already past the end of the mainstream support phase.
Note that this is really no different from previous Windows OSs. Microsoft has been releasing new operating systems about every three years, at least since the 1990s.
And that’s a fair point, but it winds up reinforcing OP’s question.
If Windows 10 is just another brick in the Windows yellow brick road, why did MS push it so aggressively? From a technological and sustainment meta-perspective, it’s not novel. It’s still an evolutionary improvement over previous Windows OSs.
The aggressiveness of the deployment (both the “free upgrade” angle and the “offer you can’t refuse angle”) is what’s novel in the consumer PC world.
It’s weird, though. I’m an old mainframe systems guy. This kind of “upgrade now, no, you don’t have a choice” marketing is old hat in that realm. Even if you own the hardware, the vendor would cut off your license to run the older version of the operating system. You would upgrade or you’d have several hundreds of thousands of dollars of big iron rusting in the machine room. (Of course, this wasn’t common; more often than not, you leased all the software even if you owned the hardware, and the upgrade came as part of the ongoing maintenance contract.)
And that’s one suspicion in the tech press about Microsoft’s approach: they’re paving the road for Windows to be a subscription – leased by the time period, not “bought”. Your system no longer boots, or boots to something like the old Windows Genuine Advantage failure nag screen, unless your account is current.
I don’t see that happening. Plenty of people are like my mother, who want a computer to send email and so forth but aren’t so enamored of it that they’d pay a subscription fee. Many of those will be tempted to switch to an iPad, or some other product offered by a competitor.
I could see them offering the subscription model if it offers additional features, but I don’t see them cutting off non-subscribers entirely. People are just too used to the idea that they can keep an OS running indefinitely without additional payment.
Mostly this. An easier way to bring as many people under the same roof before they stop supporting Windows 7. There has been talk that Windows 10 may be a ‘service’, but not a subscription type of service that stops working if you don’t upgrade.