The Windows 7 Waffle? (Premium)

You may have seen the news that some customers will be given an additional free year of Windows 7 support. Does this mean that Microsoft is going to waffle on its support demands and keep extending the timeline, as it did infamously for Windows XP?

Your guess is as good as mine. But I don’t think so: There are some big differences between the end of life (EOL) of Windows 7 and that of XP. That said, the collateral damage will be the same. And the audience that’s hurt most by this looming support milestone is, of course, individuals.

Here’s what’s happening.

As a legacy version of Windows, Windows 7 is bound by Microsoft’s ten-year support lifecycle, which is split into two five-year segments. In the first five years, called mainstream support, the product could ostensibly be improved with new features (it wasn’t). And in the second five years, called extended support, the product will be supported with bug and security fixes (which it has).

Windows 7 extended support ends on January 14, 2020. To avoid the type of thing that happened when Windows XP support ended—Microsoft kept extending its support deadline because so many customers were still running the system at the time—the software giant began publicly warning of the end of support in 2018.

Then, in September 2018, Microsoft bowed to its corporate customers by allowing them to use Windows 7 past the January 2020 EOL. But there was a catch: Unlike the uncertainty around the XP EOL, this time around Microsoft would let its corporate customers, and only its corporate customers, pay for additional support in one-year increments. And the fees would be onerous, and double each year, as an enticement to upgrade as quickly as possible.

In February 2019, we learned how expensive this extra support will be: Microsoft’s largest business customers will pay $50 per PC for Windows 7 Professional, or $75 for Windows 7 Enterprise, between January 2020 and January 2021. The next year, it goes up to $100/$150. And it doubles through four years, at which time the cost is $200/$300 per PC.

The decision to provide corporate customers—and, really, only its biggest corporate customers—with additional support for a fee eliminated one of the issues with XP’s EOL: The timeframe is explicit and well-understood, as are the costs. Of course, it does nothing to help individuals or smaller businesses that might like to keep using Windows 7.

This week’s news, which arrives courtesy of Mary Jo Foley, is that “Microsoft is offering a Windows 7 extended security update to some users.” That might seem like a sign of hope for those individuals and smaller businesses, but it’s not: Instead, Microsoft is running a limited-time promotion in which its Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Enterprise Subscription Agreement (EAS) customers with active subscriptions to Windows 10 E5, Microsoft 365 E5, and Microsoft 365 E5 Security can opt to get Windows 7 Extended Security Updates for a year for no additional charge.

In other words, this once again only impacts Microsoft’s biggest corporate customers. More specifically, the ones that are already paying Microsoft a lot of money per PC for Windows, Office, and the rest of Microsoft 365. This isn’t a waffle, as Microsoft did so often with XP, but is rather a nice incentive for those well-heeled corporate customers that the software giant loves the most.

So what about everyone else?

I’ve already received a lot of emails from readers who are worried about what will happen when Windows 7 exits support, many of which are “stuck” with the system because of specific compatibility needs. Others are simply using PCs that work just fine for their needs, thank you very much. But there is almost certainly a much larger audience—the silent masses—who have no idea what to do when January 2020 comes. And for many of them, buying a new PC is out of the question.

To help prod this audience, Microsoft began delivering an EOL notification to Windows 7 users back in March. This is good communication, for sure, something I’m not usually able to complement the firm on. But it does nothing to address the needs of those who want or need to stick with Windows 7. What can that audience do?

Here, the Windows XP experience can serve as a guide.

While you won’t be able to continue using Windows 7 safely and securely forever, you can almost certainly do so for a year or two if you install a third-party security/AV package and a modern (non-IE) web browser like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and/or the new (Chromium-based) Edge, if that’s ever released and supported. You will need to pay attention in both cases, as the makers of those software packages will no doubt stop supporting Windows 7 at some point as well.

For those who literally need a single software application—I’ve heard from two such people so far—I don’t see why you can’t use that application, and only that application, going forward, assuming that you’ve installed a good third party security package and have moved your day-to-day computing activities to another PC. But again, over time, that option will cease to be available. (If your PC doesn’t have to be online to run that one app, all the better.)

You might also consider a virtualization environment. In this case, you’ll have to go through the potentially arduous process of choosing a virtual machine solution (Hyper-V, VMWare, VirtualBox, etc.), acquiring Windows 7 Setup media, installing the system and whatever app(s) in the VM, and then activating the OS using your original Windows 7 product key; a call to Microsoft support is somewhat likely, but I’m told they’re pretty good about moving product keys for customers.

Yes, that last one is beyond the skills of most average users. But nothing lasts forever. And it’s a huge problem for Microsoft and the PC industry that PCs simply last a lot longer than they used to. And that so many people either don’t care about upgrading or simply can’t move forward because of various compatibility issues.

The good news? This should be the last time that Windows users have such a major milestone to worry about. Going forward, the only supported versions of Windows will (eventually) be versions of Windows 10. And Windows 10 to Windows 10 upgrades have been relatively pain-free so far, in the sense that no version of Windows 10 has ever introduced major application compatibility issues. You may eventually need to switch PCs—Windows 10 has and will continue to drop support for certain hardware components over time—but if it runs on Windows 10, it will always run on Windows 10.

You know, for the foreseeable future.