This policy change primarily applies to commercial customers who are now managing deployments with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, and does not apply to customers running Windows 10. At least they’ll have a few more years of extended support before they have to pay Microsoft for another custom agreement for continued protection of their Windows 8.1 machines.
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“We have extended the support period from July 17, 2018 to the end of support dates for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1; and we will provide all applicable security updates“, wrote Shad Larsen, a director of Windows business planning, on a company blog.
“This policy change affects our 6th generation Intel Core (Skylake) support policy for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 devices”, Microsoft documentation notes.
“The Met should have stopped using Windows XP in 2014 when extended support ended, and to hear that 27,000 computers are still using it is worrying”. “Until the Met Police gets all of its Windows XP systems upgraded, I would also recommend doubling down on monitoring the network and hunting for threats as a possible mitigation strategy”.
The list of supported Skylake devices is here. In March, for example, Lenovo implied that it disagreed with Microsoft, likely concerned about losing sales if customers were uncertain whether they could complete migrations from Windows 7 to Windows 10 by the initial 2017 deadline.
While it’s not clear what has changed, the obvious suspicion is that Intel caved, and did the work to improve Skylake for Windows 7/8.1 rather than force Microsoft to do so as it had originally demanded. That included the United Kingdom government, which reportedly paid £5.5 million ($7.2 million) for a one-year support contract. Of course, Windows 10 was built for that type of new chipset and beyond so support for it was not considered an issue.
Skylake is now fully supported on Windows 7 and 8.1. Previously, Microsoft said it would only support Windows 7/8.1 on Skylake through July 17, 2018.
Today’s latest change to the Skylake support cut-off dates also applies to Windows Embedded 7, 8 and 8.1 devices. There are now over 350 million devices on Windows 10 and more than 135 billion hours of use since the launch, with enterprise customers deploying Windows 10 to devices every day.
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“This change is created to help our customers purchase modern hardware with confidence, while continuing to manage their migrations to Windows 10”, a source at Microsoft told me.
