14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 7 is projected to reach the end-of-support in January 2020, and this is seen as a major catalyst for both home users and IT pros to begin the transition to Windows 10.
But according to a new survey conducted by Kollective and involving 260 IT decision makers in the UK and the US, this doesn’t seem to be a rush.
No less than 43 percent of the respondents said they are still running Windows 7 (as per ITProPortal), which is worrying to say the least when looking back at how much companies needed to upgrade from Windows XP.
Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP on April 8, 2014, but some companies needed as much as five years to give up on this OS version. This means there’s a good chance a number of these firms would stay on Windows 7 even after the January 2020 deadline.
Windows XP still powering some computers
What’s even worse is that some 17 percent of the companies didn’t even know that the support for Windows 7 is coming to an end. In January 2020, Microsoft would stop offering security updates for Windows 7, so any new vulnerability in the operating system wouldn’t get any patch.
If this isn’t concerning enough, 33 percent of the companies with more than 100,000 systems are still running Windows XP, the operating system that was launched no less than 17 years ago.
There’s a good side of the story too. The upgrade to Windows 10 is described as a priority for 33 percent of the companies, which means that sooner or later, the switch to the new OS would eventually start anyway.
Windows 7 has a market share that exceeds 40 percent, and Windows 10 is projected to overtake it in order to become the world’s leading desktop OS by the end of the year. The decline, however, takes place at a pace slower than originally projected.