Office 2019: Win10 only, and 7 years of support rather than 10

[mikeymikec]

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/02/01/1921204/microsoft-office-2019-will-only-work-on-windows-10

 

[lxskllr]

<Win10 probably lacks support for the spyware api hooks :^P

We use libreoffice at work.

 

[XavierMace]

Does this surprise anyone? Apple's greatest advantages when it comes to providing a stable platform is a limited hardware scope, and a limited OS base to manage because their users actually update. Microsoft wants what Apple has. You still have tons of people clinging on to Windows XP. When was the last time you heard ANYBODY talk about Mac OS 9? Not having to deal with legacy support for the last 15 years of OS's makes for a much smaller code base and therefore less to go wrong.

 

[mikeymikec]

Does this surprise anyone?

No, but the rest of what you wrote is irrelevant unless Microsoft is harbouring some serious delusions that will destroy it far sooner than later.

If a company wants the enterprise computer market, then legacy support is essential. As things currently are, MS is supporting four versions of Windows 10 because enterprises unsurprisingly aren't that enthusiastic about major OS upgrades every 6 months as they need their business functions to continue to work more than they need the latest irrelevant changes to Windows 10. If MS was so concerned about having to provide more legacy support than what is strictly speaking necessary, then perhaps they shouldn't be rolling out new subversions of Windows every 6 months.

 

[XavierMace]

No, but the rest of what you wrote is irrelevant unless Microsoft is harbouring some serious delusions that will destroy it far sooner than later.

If a company wants the enterprise computer market, then legacy support is essential. As things currently are, MS is supporting four versions of Windows 10 because enterprises unsurprisingly aren't that enthusiastic about major OS upgrades every 6 months as they need their business functions to continue to work more than they need the latest irrelevant changes to Windows 10. If MS was so concerned about having to provide more legacy support than what is strictly speaking necessary, then perhaps they shouldn't be rolling out new subversions of Windows every 6 months.

As soon as you start mentioning Microsoft destroying themselves, I have a hard time taking you seriously.

The company already HAS the enterprise computer market. Legacy support isn't nearly as essential as most people make it out to be and it's been proven before. It's pretty rare these days that there isn't a modern option for what you're doing/using, somebody just doesn't want to put in the effort of updating. I should know, it's a battle I fight on a daily basis. But when your security auditors are telling you the XP systems need to go away, your IT vendor is telling you it needs to go away, and your other software vendors are telling you it needs to go away, guess what? It's going to go away.

Supporting multiple builds of 10 is moot as it's still the same code base. That's completely different than supporting multiple OS's. Getting people off XP/Vista/7/8 is step 1. The world is a better place at that point. At that point, people don't have to be enthusiastic about major OS updates as they don't really have a choice. What are they going to do about it? If you say switch to Linux, I'm just going to laugh at you. When you're largely the only player in the game you can largely do whatever you want. Microsoft does it all the time, just like Cisco, VMWare, etc.

If you want further examples of why this needs to happen, just ask anybody who has to juggle multiple outdated versions of Java because they have applications that require specific old versions. That dumpster fire also needs to die.

 

[mikeymikec]

As soon as you start mentioning Microsoft destroying themselves, I have a hard time taking you seriously.

Perhaps you ought to re-read what I wrote because you've apparently missed the point I made.

If you think that MS can just drop one of the biggest merits of their platform in a heartbeat and it wouldn't matter, well that's certainly an interesting opinion; I don't think it has much basis in reality due to the counter-points I already raised. Same goes for your comments about laziness.

I don't think your opinion about code bases has much basis in reality either, but since I don't have access to MS OS source code and I doubt you do either, it's all speculation. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that since all the versions of Windows you mentioned are based on the NT kernel that they share a code base, and while I'm sure that there are huge differences between XP and Win10 1709, that as you get closer to Win10 1709 with each major OS version and update, the differences get smaller. Since the NT kernel, AFAIK MS has never started from scratch. If the differences were as great as you make out, then the Windows patch lists would be pretty unlikely to list all supported versions of Windows as being equally vulnerable most of the time, and I doubt that MS would bother wasting their time by making different patch packages for different Win10 versions if they were all the same. "Code base" is rather a loose term when talking about OS development IMO.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I'll just stick to office 2016 pro.