Axe-happy Microsoft halves support for Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Channel Rationalisation of the Long Term Servicing Channels at Microsoft has led to the firm chopping the support lifecycle of the next LTSC of Windows 10 in half: from 10 to five years. Enterprises don't like change and Microsoft has traditionally kept its operating systems going far beyond the expectations of their designers – …
"With the fast and increasing pace of technological change, it is a challenge to get the up-to-date experience customers expect when using a decade-old product."
Yes, you might miss out on the terror of unexpected upheaval in your production environment if you go with boring stability and reliability...
The only experience I usually get from Windows 10 is that of a product in permanent beta status.
6 years on from the original release, Windows 10 still feels rough and unfinished to me. The UI is flat, lifeless and uninspiring, there's still the strange mis-mash between Settings and Control Panel, the Start Menu is still an ugly mess, the "busy" animation still feels like a placeholder as the rotating balls disappear then reappear every second revolution, the sounds still have that whiff of having been created in a hurry by an intern with a Casio keyboard.
Quite simply, it doesn't feel like a finished and polished product. Too many bits feel as if they're quick and temporary mock-ups that were intended to be replaced with the finished article in due course. Age is generally irrelevant to me, I simply expect my OS to feel well designed and finished. Ironically to me, Windows 7 still feels like the last OS that Microsoft actually finished properly.
I would much rather see a stable operating system (like Windows 7) that has bugs and security issues maintained but NO NEW FEATURES added! I find that most of the problems with Windows 10 can be resolved by going to "Windows Features" and turning them off - it's more like "Windows Problems" than features.
Every Windows 10 "update" offering new "features" is like curing your headaches by running into a wall - yes, that "fixed it"!
You can buy from sites like gkeys24.com for any microsoft product with legit licenses less than your lunch. Pay $180 bucks for shoddy windoze support, nah, but maybe $9 bucks for a win10 pro/enterprise license. Funny how microsoft whores themselves out to nations that can't support paying $180usd, but can $9 and takes it, while charging us fools full price in the US. Anyone can buy in through less than savory channels at a fraction of cost, but is it any less legit? I can buy a legit, ie certified by microsoft license of win10 pro, visio, and project for less than 50 dollars normally, likely from China. Glad China gets the hookup, and I can subsequently.
Paying any more for windoze or other m$ products is absurd unless a fool. Why even pay for office when LibreOffice is a superior standard. I use visio/project, but office is a waste to invest in with better free solutions for basic office alone.
I think Microsoft's long term goal is to get everyone on a recurring subscription model. The PC will be relegated to a pure browser. All of the OS would be Azure based making updates, LTS etc no longer appropriate. There would be no distribution channels to handle, no DVD's etc which lowers their costs a lot.
With the whole of the world with money to spend connected to the Internet then that works as a model. All of the major computing suppliers now have the same strategy towards cloud connections with recurring subscriptions.
Those of us that want on-site computing then Linux is a good enough, and cheaper, substitute.
M$ SAYS
"With the fast and increasing pace of technological change, it is a challenge to get the up-to-date experience customers expect when using a decade-old product."
Never seems to occur to them that some of us are happy with things as they are ... or rather as they were. I still think the Win2K interface was the cleanest and simplest they ever produced. I stayed with that (with some help from Classic shell) until I had to upgrade to Win10. Even now I am fairly close to it. I can do most tasks on muscle memory without having to figure out what the new glyphs mean (they are not icons as they have no resemblance to the thing they purport to represent).
I also think the w2k (and "classic" for XP, not default Fischer-Price) user interface design was the best MS did in terms of being logical and consistent in virtually every way. Win7 is tolerable, but the lack of keeping constant look & feel was showing before it disgorged its unholy load with win8 and later tried to stuff it back in, poorly, with win10.
And shall we mention the spyware of later MS offerings?
"Microsoft cited feedback it had received from customers as a factor in its decision to cut the period of support and noted: "With the fast and increasing pace of technological change, it is a challenge to get the up-to-date experience customers expect when using a decade-old product.""
No customer ever in the history of man would actively want their vendor to reduce support length. Microsoft are completely out of touch with the IT industry.
Yep, nobody wants shorter support. It also makes absolutely no sense, because the long term support builds of 10 track the long term support builds of Windows Server - they're ALREADY going to be making security patches for those exact builds, for the server version, so why not let the desktop user also enjoy a simple, stable platform with security patches only?
Because.. Microsoft
> Microsoft cited feedback it had received from customers as a factor in its decision to cut the period of support and noted: "With the fast and increasing pace of technological change we've decided to make the problem worse by forcing even more change on you."
There, FTFY.
You nailed it. If Office is a five-year plan, and Windows is a 10-year plan, after five years Office is still frozen because they can't break Windows. Also explains why they can support server for 10 years, because they don't expect Office to be deployed on a server.
Oh wait. That's exactly what my company does, all the VMs are deployed on server. I predict a change to the server LTS within the next five years.
That is until they do it to their server line too. They do not want you to have your own servers, they want you on Azure.
Then they will want you off windows, why you say, because what will make them more money, having everyone using linux and charging them, or having people use windows after developing it and charging them.
If they can have someone else develop the OS for them and still have the same number of people / systems running in Azure, more profit.
Else they would lose Azure customers fast. It is rich native app integrations with Microsoft cloud services (365/Azure) that keeps them bringing in the cash. If everybody used Linux, Azure AD would be dead. If everybody used web based tools, Office Online would lose customers due to being tied to the abomination that is SharePoint and its inaccessibility to individuals (it is enterprise-only).
Also, there isn’t a single day of the week where something isn’t broken or wonky with Azure and by extension their live, real-time services like Teams. Using a desktop app hides all that somewhat by working offline seamlessly through the benefit of local storage. All that falls over when you can’t save your work because their systems have sharted again.
TL;DR Windows helps Microsoft hide its true incompetence...
I'll remind people we were promised Windows 10 would be the last windows ever. Small mercies that it's true. I've been using Linux on my home setup full-time about 5 years now and dabbling with W10 or Server 2019 just uncovers how painful it is to try and go back to. No control; poor support out of the box with the installation ISO (particularly motherboard and network drivers), activation difficulties.
I know the usage statistics (e.g. steam hardware survey has us at ~1%) say otherwise but linux on the desktop is absolutely viable today. Now if only to persuade others to follow.
In other news I set up yet another old AMD A8-based laptop that had become useless under Windows with Linux Mint. One very happy 18-yr old media/graphics student was the result. Pretty good advert if there ever was one.
this reminds me of banks quoting with straight face, in the UK and a few other countries, so presumably, everywhere else too, that the customers "overwhelmingly" prefer online banking to branch banking and ATMs, so they have to change the business model and close those branches. This customer preference had NOTHING to do with mass-scale, but low-key branches closures before the "preference" was made public. It's like the gov claiming 99.99% of people actually PREFER to pay taxes, because only 0.01% of people don't pay them...
AC» this reminds me of banks quoting with straight face, in the UK and a few other countries, so presumably, everywhere else too, that the customers "overwhelmingly" prefer online banking to branch banking and ATMs, so they have to change the business model and close those branches.
This may very well actually be true. How many people pay their bills in a bank branch? When was the last time you were in a bank branch? Foreign currency payments I do with Paypal. I do all of my day-to-day banking online now and I meet a bank official whenever we need to take out loans or some such. This is usually once every ten years.
it was banks that forced people off branches by closing lots of them, and then claiming their customers don't go to branches because they 'prefer' to do banking online... Yes, I 'prefer" to do it online, because in the last 10 - 15 years, all the branches within a good few miles around me have shut. And I do live in a rural town called London (though not exactly by the 'Bank' tube station...)
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