bjack on 2/6/2016 at 17:14
Also, web browsers are starting to get nasty. I also have a Mac that was on Mountain Lion and I could not get the latest Safari or Chrome. I had to update to at least Yosemite (I went to El Capitan) just to be able to use certain web sites.
Who knows how long MS will support Win 7 in the sense of Office and IE? IE is dead now. Will Chrome pull the same thing they did with Apple and say Win7 is no longer supported? I'd give it 2 years.
10 is unnecessarily cumbersome and “automatic”, but I can still get it to a fairly “XP” type interface. It does run faster, boots far faster, and background updates don't seem to lock everything up. 10 is faster than Win7 in my opinion. No, I do not like the nannies, but I can work around them. The box is a Xeon 4 core HP Z400 workstation - probably from 2008 or 2009. 6 GB mem. GeForce 610 2 GB video card. Nothing super fast, but runs Soul Tears FMs now without a stumble. It did have a slower frame rate on Win7.
heywood on 2/6/2016 at 19:41
IE is not dead yet. The Edge browser is not even included in the Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB that corporate & government customers will use.
bjack on 2/6/2016 at 21:21
Quote Posted by heywood
IE is not dead yet. The Edge browser is not even included in the Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB that corporate & government customers will use.
I was not aware of that. Since losing my IT job a coupe years ago to outsourcing, I am no longer privy to what is going on in corporate. I was under the impression the last IE was the last IE and Edge was the replacement. I have to say, I do not like Edge that much. I usually don’t use it unless downloading new FMs or the occasional TTLG chat or other. I’m mostly on my Mac.
Anyway, I think my point about forced obsolesce is a factor. Lots of companies are doing it to older Mac OSs, even when they are in fact still supported, so why not older MS products?
heywood on 2/6/2016 at 23:40
One of the reasons why Microsoft is still dominant in business & government is that they have a well defined lifecycle for each product based on a general rule of supporting products for 10 years from the date of release. And also subscription-like enterprise agreements which give their customers a lot of flexibility over how to deploy their products and when to upgrade. Red Hat more or less copied it, which is why they are the biggest enterprise Linux vendor.
At work, we're looking out into the future 10 years when making IT architecture decisions on some projects, establishing budgets and making long term plans based around hardware and software obsolescence. It is important that all of our software and hardware suppliers honor their support commitments, and we often pay exorbitant annual rates for software support or "maintenance" to guarantee their commitment.
The currently published end date for Windows 7 support is January 14, 2020. A lot of people are planning around that. If Microsoft were to renege on that date and either stop updating Windows 7 or otherwise make it impractical to continue using, they would be risking the loss of their primary source of revenue.
That said, it would not surprise me at all if Microsoft were to continue strong-arming consumers to try to coax them onto Windows 10.
faetal on 2/6/2016 at 23:51
I thought the reason MS were the dominant force is because they got there first with the defining OS and large organisations just hate change due to the amount of logistics involved. Christ I used to work in systems testing for a large financial services company and migrating to a different system was a monumental task in terms of satisfying all user needs. Changing OS to something not iterative on the last one would be unthinkable unless the OS of choice had become untenable somehow. After that it's like a crystallisation effect - big businesses need to communicate between themselves, often use the same software packages, so these packages get developed just on the one platform - positive feedback etc etc...
bjack on 2/6/2016 at 23:55
It is not MS support I am worried about, but 3rd parties that will just give up. Under no circumstances was my version of OS-X not supported, yet Google claimed it was and refused my attempts to update my Chrome installation. The result? No longer using Chrome on Mac. As said, I did update my Mac OS to the latest, so no worries there, but I have to wonder about the integrity of Google... HA! As if they had any to begin with ;) If you are 100% MS, then you are probably OK for the next 4 or so years. If you use 3rd party programs, good luck.
icemann on 3/6/2016 at 12:52
Quote Posted by WingedKagouti
As long as you don't expect security updates to your OS in 5 years time, you should be fine.
That's a price (myself included) many are fully prepared to pay.
heywood on 3/6/2016 at 19:03
faetal,
For sure there's an argument that momentum is helping Microsoft hold onto the corporate desktop, mostly because there's a lot of software out there that's only available on Windows. But equally important is that they know how to cater to enterprise IT organizations.
Probably more than half of the people I work with would rather be using Apple. But despite the interest, Apple is going nowhere in this market because they won't support an OS for more than ~2 years, they traditionally haven't been as careful about maintaining backward compatibility, they don't want to support customization of the OS image, and they don't provide a rich set tools for deploying and maintaining systems. But the biggest reason of all is that they don't tell you where they are going so you can't plan. Apple wants to keep all their development secret and then release it in a big reveal to lots of fanfare. That business practice is something I don't want to deal with at work. No surprises please.
On the server side, we are adopting Microsoft more and more with every project as we replace existing commercial UNIX systems. We're using Linux too, but we probably deploy 2 instances of Windows Server for every Linux. It's a good, stable, well supported product and it's cost effective.
bjack on 3/6/2016 at 21:40
For database servers, unless you are locked in MS SQL Server, many DBs run much better on LINUX or Solaris and AIX. Try building a 440 node cluster in MS and run DB2. Not so easy. Fairly easy with LINUX. But this topic really has nothing to do with Win10 and the average user. Win10 is OK. Yes, it has its downside (big brother features), but many of those can be turned off or toned down.
Most people will not notice the nanny things. Those that surf a lot of porn or post weird things on TTLG may want to turn off some or all of the tracking. It can be done. Since I am a saint, I have not bothered to turn off much. ;)
faetal on 3/6/2016 at 22:03
Quote Posted by heywood
faetal,
Text
It's similar to the Facebook thing - people keep trying to create a superior social networking platform, but the point is that it doesn't matter if your platform is better, it would need to either several times better or the original platform would need to fall behind the curve enough to justify ripping a big integrated infrastructure out by the roots and starting fresh. I never worked for any big company which would risk starting fresh with an integrated system.
