They're not going to make it...

Since I haven't been watching the monthly market share numbers as intently as I used to, I really didn't have the correct context in which to place this bit of news when it was first posted last week:

With the Windows 7 end-of-support clock slowly winding down to January 14, 2020, Microsoft is announcing it will offer, for a fee, continuing security updates for the product through January 2023. This isn't the first time Microsoft has done this for a version of Windows, but it may be the first time it has been so public about its plans to do so.

Windows 7 still has a large share of the overall Windows market, especially among business customers. Moving off older versions of Windows is a slow process, even with advance planning, for companies with multiple thousands of Windows desktop machines.

The paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESUs) will be sold on a per-device basis, with the price increasing each year. These ESUs will be available to any Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise users with volume-licensing agreements, and those with Windows Software Assurance and/or Windows 10 Enterprise or Education subscriptions will get a discount. Office 365 ProPlus will continue to work on devices with Windows 7 Extended Security Updates through January 2023.

[...]

This time around, the ESU program is being run out of Microsoft's Volume Licensing Unit and Core Windows Engineering "is producing these updates like a product," [Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365] explained.

"We want to encourage people to get off Windows 7, but we want to make it more than something punitive," he said.

This was the second move that Microsoft made in a direction of accommodating the "slow process" of operating system migration at scale; they also announced that they're slowing the pace of forced Windows 10 updates, which was another pain point for Enterprise customers.

Some businesses have complained that they need more time and flexibility to update Windows 10, and IT admins are tasked with ensure apps work with the latest update. Microsoft is releasing new cloud-based tools to ease app compatibility testing, and the company is also giving IT admins more time to update. All currently supported feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions will be supported for 30 months from their current release. The existing policy is 18 months, so this bump brings support closer to what IT admins were used to in the Windows 7 and earlier days.

Interesting, yes? Now for the context: Windows 7 (W7) doesn't just have a large share of the market. W7 still has over forty percent of the market, according to the latest numbers from NetMarketShare.

Windows 10 (WX) has been "poised to pass Windows 7's usage share by November," according to any number of analysts and pundits, for three years now. If current trends hold, it might actually be able to deliver on that this year. That would be nearly three and a half years after it was released, and after being given away, for no up-front cost, for two and a half of those years. Microsoft, however, clearly don't believe that the current momentum will hold, and are now planning for how to manage and mitigate WXs failure to take over the market.

There are issues with this new ESU program, of course. First, it's only available to Professional and Enterprise customers, and not to W7 users at large. Second, since it's aimed at Enterprise users, it will probably be expensive, regardless of Jared Spataro's comments about this not being a punitive measure aimed at forcing W7 users over to WX. Both of those are bullshit things; Microsoft are clearly going to be producing security updates for W7 regardless, and they should be offering to extend W7 security coverage to all W7 users for three years for free... or, at worst, for a $100 fee, which is the same cost as a WX license.

I stand by my assertions of Tuesday past, however. If Canonical, Red Hat, et al. can produce a package that includes all the pieces necessary to run Windows programs out of the box, rather than making users put together their own such packages, or forcing them to make do with Linux equivalents for the Windows applications that they're used to, then there's a real opportunity here for Linux to make big gains at Windows' expense. W7 users who haven't already migrated to (or been forced to migrate to) WX, whether Home, Professional, or Enterprise, are clearly not at all keen about making the switch; they don't want to deal with the data collection, adware, bloatware, and other bullshit that's part of the WX package. Provide them with a viable alternative, and they'll take it.

The window of opportunity is closing quickly, though, and Microsoft are still in a position to close it even more quickly. All they have to do is make WX more attractive, by removing the bullshit:

• Allow users to opt out of Cortana, Edge, and data collection (or, even better, make these things opt-in). And stop trying to force Windows users to search with Bing instead of Google. Stop trying to make "fetch" happen.
• No more forced updates! At the very least, Home users should be able to defer updates by the three months currently allowed to Professional and Enterprise users. Yes, I know that Microsoft are relying on Home users to serve as a pool of uncompensated beta testers for the business customers that they really care about, but this is shit behaviour, and needs to change. MS can still make automatic updating the default or recommended setting, but savvy or cautious users should have the option of waiting.
• No more advertising! My task bar should not be interrupting my work flow to nag me into switching from Chrome (or Firefox) to Edge. Users don't care if Edge gives slightly better battery life; it's still missing basic features that they use all the time, and nagging them about it isn't winning hearts and minds away from Google; it's just annoying them.
• No more bloatware! Don't "helpfully" suggest software to users by adding it to their notification menus, and definitely don't re-add such suggested software once users remove it.
• No more feature creep! Instead of burdening users with multiple different note-taking applications, none of which talk to each other, just give them the one that most users of their tier/SKU actually use, and make the others accessible via the Microsoft Store as free add-ons. The same principle could be applied to all of the "features" that Microsoft have shoe-horned into WX over the last three years, and which almost nobody actually uses.
• Finish the product! Design language and UI behaviour needs to be made consistent across all features and applications that come installed with WX by default. The current mishmash of presentation and interface elements are variously annoying, confusing, and frustrating, giving an overall impression that's not as polished as it should be.

That's just off the top of my head.

For now, however, Microsoft seem to be content to watch WX's usage share stats slowly creep upward, while basically planning to fail at the task of winning over more users to the platform. It's all a little disappointing... and very, very Microsoft.