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It's both actually, MS is currently supporting approximately 7 OS flavors of windows as best I can tell, 5 of which are Windows 10 alone (7 SP1, 8.1, 10 RS1, 10

by leeter 9y ago

It's both actually, MS is currently supporting approximately 7 OS flavors of windows as best I can tell, 5 of which are Windows 10 alone (7 SP1, 8.1, 10 RS1, 10 RS2, 10 CBB, 10 LTSB, 10 RS3). That's a lot of OS's to deal with and be ensuring that 'It just works'. If anything I would say this is a commentary on AMD and Intel's ability to make compatible processors than just on MS' ability to support. Unfortunately new processors have Errata and can be buggy pieces of garbage as Ryzen just showed with a bug in its FMA3 implementation that would cause a GP fault. MS has to test and handle these issues for every single supported CPU. To do this they have massive labs of machines with common CPU/Mobo combos that they deploy and run tests on with every single patch and build. Not surprisingly this isn't cheap and if you have to support effectively 7 different OSes you're going to make some cost decisions. I suspect this really was a decision to focus lab hardware and development time on the latest OS versions that can more easily share the errata patches than anything nefarious.

fredsted 9y ago
There's a lot more versions. There's Server, IoT, Embedded, RT. Following your argument, they'd have to be tested as well. A few versions more of Windows 7 and 8 doesn't seem like the huge budget breaker, it just takes more time. I don't think they'd use a dedicated machine for each and every version, you can use the same machines and just change the drives or use NetBoot or whatever. The real issue here is that they want users to upgrade to Windows 10.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  > There's a lot more versions. There's Server, IoT, Embedded, RT. > A few versions more of Windows 7 and 8 doesn't seem like the huge budget breaker, There's a lot of versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 as well. Windows 7 had at least 6 SKUs. > I don't think they'd use a dedicated machine for each and every version, you can use the same machines and just change the drives or use NetBoot or whatever. You're completely underestimating the scale necessary to carry out proper testing and validation.
  - fredsted 9y ago
    >You're completely underestimating the scale necessary to carry out proper testing and validation. I think you're completely overestimating the scale. In any case, neither of us really know what's going on. One thing we know is that Microsoft has the means to test these things if they wanted to. Windows 10 has been out for a while, other processor generations came out; they didn't do this trick until now. This only came up because Microsoft is seeing that their product is extremely unpopular with their customers. From a profit perspective, they're doing the logical and obvious thing: to force users to upgrade because they need their license fees.

by leeter 9y ago

fredsted 9y ago

There's a lot more versions. There's Server, IoT, Embedded, RT. Following your argument, they'd have to be tested as well. A few versions more of Windows 7 and 8 doesn't seem like the huge budget breaker, it just takes more time. I don't think they'd use a dedicated machine for each and every version, you can use the same machines and just change the drives or use NetBoot or whatever. The real issue here is that they want users to upgrade to Windows 10.

cptskippy 9y ago
> There's a lot more versions. There's Server, IoT, Embedded, RT. > A few versions more of Windows 7 and 8 doesn't seem like the huge budget breaker, There's a lot of versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 as well. Windows 7 had at least 6 SKUs. > I don't think they'd use a dedicated machine for each and every version, you can use the same machines and just change the drives or use NetBoot or whatever. You're completely underestimating the scale necessary to carry out proper testing and validation.
- fredsted 9y ago
  >You're completely underestimating the scale necessary to carry out proper testing and validation. I think you're completely overestimating the scale. In any case, neither of us really know what's going on. One thing we know is that Microsoft has the means to test these things if they wanted to. Windows 10 has been out for a while, other processor generations came out; they didn't do this trick until now. This only came up because Microsoft is seeing that their product is extremely unpopular with their customers. From a profit perspective, they're doing the logical and obvious thing: to force users to upgrade because they need their license fees.