Windows 7: “I’m not dead yet!”

Enlarge / A man looks at the home screen for the "new" Windows 7 platform when it was launched in October 2009. Microsoft has ended support, but the OS lives on. (credit: Katie Collins - PA Images / Getty Images)

We are here to bury Windows 7, not to praise it. Today is the day that Microsoft's extended support for the Windows 7 operating system ends. Microsoft stopped selling Windows 7, which was first released in 2009, on October 13, 2013. Sales of systems with Windows 7 pre-installed ended three years to the day later in 2016. It lived a long life and is survived by Windows 10 and maybe a few remaining instances of Windows 8.

But it seems most organizations are in no hurry to cast off the now-unsupported Microsoft operating system, based on a survey from the enterprise content delivery company Kollective. A survey of 100 US- and UK-based companies found that overall, 53 percent of companies had not completed or had not started migration off of Windows 7 to Windows 10.

The continued presence of Windows 7 was more prevalent in the UK, where two-thirds of businesses are still using the operating system on at least some devices. US businesses were more likely to have moved on, with 40 percent reporting they still had Windows 7. But one-tenth of those surveyed had no idea whether Windows 7 was still running on devices within their organizations.

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