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...