It’s here again. The End-Of-Life (EOL) for a Microsoft desktop operating system. Been there done that, eh? Who can forget the security risk hype of Windows XP in April 2014? Now, Windows 10 is EOL after a ten year life and the messaging is no more security updates (without a support fee).
A couple of community and SMB ecosystem thoughts.
Migrations lag. If anything was learned from the Windows XP EOL era,
migrations lag significantly. That’s good and bad. You can boot up and use Win10 today and tomorrow. In the SMB space, it's a basic behavior to defer your spend to migrate.
Upgrade v. Buy New. Back in 2014 I was an active Microsoft vendor (V- aka V-dash) and on the Dell team inside Microsoft OEM. Trust me we had the messaging dialed in, direct mail campaigns and the infamous Dell Sunday ad in major papers. But initially it felt like a pizza party (remember the mid-night pizza parties in November 1985 with the launch of Windows 1.0 at places like CompUSA and Computer City?).
That said, folks will migrate in due time to Windows 11 and I predict the main motion will be purchasing new PCs that drive AI innovations. Happy refresh, happy OEM.
Moving to Macintosh? Not my world but I am hearing that folks are trying Macintosh for the first time. Community member Joe Cram shared this: "This cool kid switched to MacOS years ago"
Poll Results
So I ran a couple polls in our SMB MSP community and the results are shown in the figure below. Enough said.
