A few months ago, the news broke that AMD's and Intel's new chips (Ryzen and Kaby Lake, respectively) would only officially support Windows 10. The move was clearly the product of some sort of side-dealing with Microsoft; with Windows 7 still nearly twice as popular as Microsoft's newest OS, limiting support in this way effectively undercuts sales of newer-model CPUs, something which wouldn't be in AMD's or Intel's interests at all unless Microsoft had made some other concession elsewhere.
Well, we may have just found out what that concession was.
From Gregg Keizer at Computerworld:
Microsoft has largely invalidated one of Windows 10's signature concessions to corporate customers, said Gartner analysts who recommended that enterprises reconsider running the operating system's most stable and static edition.
"Microsoft has clarified support plans for LTSB, highlighting restrictions and caveats that could make this an unviable strategy," wrote Stephen Kleynhans and Michael Silver in a Gartner research note to clients earlier this month.
[...]
The most far-reaching change was quietly revealed as the 22nd item in a long FAQ on Windows support. "Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Branches, also known as LTSBs, will support the currently released silicon at the time of release of the LTSB," the new policy stated [emphasis added]. "As future silicon generations are released, support will be created through future Windows 10 LTSB releases that customers can deploy for those systems."
The tying of support to the latest silicon -- to the current generation of processors and associated chipsets from the likes of Intel and AMD -- was broadly communicated by Microsoft in January 2016, and revised in March. However, most of the attention paid to the unprecedented change was about how it affected those running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on newer PCs. Even though Microsoft also said at the time that "all future silicon releases will require the latest release of Windows 10," there was no clear call-out that the same rule applied to LTSB.
But it did, and does. And there's the rub.
To me, this stinks of quid pro quo. Microsoft clearly wanted AMD and Intel to limit support for new CPUs to Windows 10, thus pushing the market in a Win10 direction to which it clearly wasn't inclined to move naturally; AMD and Intel clearly wanted to be compensated for passing on 48% of the PC market by doing so. And thus, we have this change to the Long-Term Service Branch of Windows, which only existed in the first place "because of corporate customer resistance to the accelerated tempo of added features, changed code and altered UI in Windows 10."
The other effect of this side-deal between AMD, Intel, and Microsoft, is to undercut the appeal of Windows 10 to Enterprise customers. The allure of LTSB was that Enterprise customers' IT departments wouldn't have to spent nearly as much time dealing with upgrades as Microsoft phased out earlier Windows 10 versions in favour of newer ones. That's not the case, anymore:
The other effect of this side-deal between AMD, Intel, and Microsoft, is to undercut the appeal of Windows 10 to Enterprise customers. The allure of LTSB was that Enterprise customers' IT departments wouldn't have to spent nearly as much time dealing with upgrades as Microsoft phased out earlier Windows 10 versions in favour of newer ones. That's not the case, anymore:
"Many I&O [Infrastructure & Operations] leaders expected to pick a single LTSB release that they would deploy and run for up to 10 years on all their organizations' PCs, old and new," Kleynhans and Silver said in their report.
"With Microsoft's latest guidance on LTSB, this is not possible."The problem, they explained, is that in the face of essentially annual silicon upgrades by Intel, enterprises would have to ditch the idea of sticking with a single LTSB build for, say, five years. Instead, they could be required to adopt virtually every LTSB version as they buy new PCs powered by new generations of silicon.It seems to me that this carve-out side-deal undercuts both Windows 10 Enterprise adoption, and the sales of new PCs. Why switch to Windows 10 now when it means more upgrading going forward; why not just stay with what you're already using for another couple of years? Also, why buy new PCs, if your existing software won't be fully supported on them; why not just stick with the hardware you're already using, which is probably still perfectly fine?
Coming at a time when new PC sales have been in decline for years, making new PCs look even less attractive because of the extra Win10 IT support costs that will come with them seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly. For organizations that use a large number of PCs of varying ages, the fact that Windows 10 now requires frequent hardware and software updates (because otherwise you'll have multiple different Windows 10 versions running on the same corporate network) would seem to create something of a barrier to entry.
If this was the price for AMD and Intel to preferentially support Windows 10 over the (much more popular) Windows 7, as I suspect, then it looks to have been both short-sighted and self-defeating, meaning fewer sales of new PCs and slower adoption of Windows 10. It's as if some MS executive had "get AMD & Intel on-board" as one of their key results, and didn't really care what the consequences were of doing the deal that made it happen.
I suppose it isn't particularly surprising that Microsoft appears to have basically bribed both AMD and Intel into tying all of their new product releases to one specific version of Windows. I'm just surprised that AMD and Intel sold out so cheaply; it seems like they're giving up far more than they're getting back.