14, 2025.Īssuming Microsoft continues to deliver two feature upgrades a year, with the first-half release supported for 18 months and the second-half release supported for 30 months, the last upgrade would have to be Windows 10 24H1, with a support cutoff a year and a half later, at that Oct. While that did not represent anything close to a plan for how Microsoft will sunset Windows 10 - ideally, next week's virtual event on June 25 will outline the operating system's retirement - there are things that can be gleaned from the confluence of the notice and Windows release cadence.īecause of the intervals between a given feature upgrade release and its expiration - the 18 or 30 months of support Microsoft has pledged - the company will have to stop issuing feature upgrades long before Oct.
The most interesting bit on the support lifecycle pages for Windows 10 Home, Pro, Enterprise and Education is the warning which states, "Microsoft will continue to support at least one Windows 10 Semi-Annual Channel until October 14, 2025." No wonder interest was sparked: If retirement is Windows 10's end state, what has been the point of the last six years? Wasn't Windows 10 to be different, a radical split from the company's OS traditions? So, Windows 10 will end. What purpose would it serve to overhaul Windows - in a fashion similar to those of 2001 (XP) or 2009 (Windows 7) - when its prime customers not only could not be moved by marketing but would object to substantial change just for change sake? It all seems so wasteful of time and effort.Īll of that, from promises of "last version" to Windows' reduced role in Redmond's grand plans, were repudiated by sudden talk of retirement. Windows coasted, rested, if not on any laurels then on the practical impossibility of a rival to replace it in the commercial and organizational worlds. More subtly, Microsoft's attention, once fixed on Windows (or so it seemed) had very much wandered to more lucrative products and services, like Azure and anything that could have cloud tacked onto it. Likewise, Microsoft pitched Windows 10 as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) creature that, by its nature, was everlasting, a Darwinian thing that evolved over time, mutated even, in which individual entities certainly expired (as do specific versions) but the species lived on (until a figurative meteor, the dissolution of the company, wiped it out). If eternal, how could there be an it's-dead date?
Windows 10 was, to use Microsoft's words, "the last version of Windows," implying that 10 would last, in some fashion, forever. Not because of pages flying from a stock calendar shot, but because of the cognitive dissonance between what Microsoft said and what Microsoft did. 14, 2025, deadline was new and newsworthy.Īlthough Microsoft said six years ago that Windows 10 would exit support in a decade, just like every other version of its operating system, during those years everyone forgot the pledge. It's not surprising that so many thought the Oct. In other words, no matter how many online articles assert the 2025 retirement is a new thing, a deadline only now expressed by Microsoft, that's simply not so. (Although the Wayback Machine was explicit on the history of the Home/Pro and Enterprise/Education SKUs' end-of-support pages, Computerworld reporters, who have visited those URLs scores of times this year alone to verify retirement dates for specific feature upgrades, didn't remember the big blue box and didn't notice the 10-year ending for Windows 10 overall. 14, 2025, date and even the highlighted warning since at least October 2020, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. In fact, the support URLs cited by and echoed by other outlets have included the Oct.
Since January 2015, Microsoft had said that 10 would be sustained "for the supported lifetime of the device," a brand new phrase that it infuriatingly refused to define no matter how many times it was asked to do so.
(So, exactly as was, say, Windows 7 and all the Windows before that.) As Computerworld reported that July, Microsoft's accounting of that 10-year stretch of support for Windows 10 finally clarified Microsoft's obtuse statements about support. Weeks before Windows 10 July 29, 2015, launch, Microsoft declared that it would support the OS with updates for 10 years, until October 2025, and in the traditional Mainstream and Extended periods of half a decade each.