Microsoft yesterday announced the release of the Windows 7 SP1 convenience rollup, a collection of security and other updates for the seven-year-old operating system. The release includes core Windows fixes, security fixes and hot fixes that have been issued since Service Pack 1 was released in 2011 and is designed to simplify the updating process.
Microsoft’s decision to release the bundle is a departure from the firm’s stance earlier this year, when it said it had no news on the promised convenience rollup of fixes for Windows 7, stressing instead “the success our customers are experiencing upgrading to Windows 10”.
At the beginning of the year, Microsoft announced it would phase out support for Windows 7 and 8 on new PC hardware. The move seemed designed to encourage businesses not to downgrade new Windows 10 machines to an earlier OS, as has been common in the past in order to standardize corporate hardware. However, Microsoft later watered down the plans, pushing back the point at which it will end full extended support for Windows 7 and 8.1 machines running on Intel’s Skylake CPUs.
Many organizations are still in the early planning stage when it comes to Windows 10 and in a recession curtailing costs today may mean more than cutting costs over the next 12 month. Most of the PCs running Windows 10 today are in the consumer segment of the market, and tWindows 7 is probably running on 80 percent-plus business Windows PCs it is estimated.
“Microsoft has to find ways to please and delight enterprise customers, and ease the burden on IT departments. The Anniversary Edition update to Windows 10 will drive upgrades by early adopters, but mass adoption is still some way off, more like mid-2017 through to 2020. Unless organizations will have a clear insight into its business value e.g. to add key business features such as Enterprise Data Protection .
Gartner had predicted that adoption of Windows 10 by business would be “significantly more rapid” than that of Windows 7 but this year it was more cautious, claiming that flat IT budgets are pushing the start of enterprise migrations back to 2017.
