Microsoft Windows 10 support will end in 2025... kind of
It’s going to take another 9 years before Microsoft announces a next version of Windows 10, or will it?
With now 300 million active users and counting, Microsoft Windows 10 continues to be the Microsoft operating system with the fastest adoption rate, out of all prior versions.
The responsibility for the growth of Windows 10 belongs to multiple factors. First of all, the concept of Windows 10 as a service allows Microsoft to constantly update and upgrade the operating system based on users feedback, instead of waiting years to release service packs or successive versions. This fact alone incentivizes users to stay within the Windows 10 ecosystem, with an optimistic expectation for bugs and anomalies to be fixed within a reasonable length of time.
Another reason is the fact that until July 29th of this year, owners of legit licenses of Windows 7 and Windows 8 are still eligible to upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost.
Finally, and most importantly, aside from Microsoft's own flagship Surface Pro and Surface Book product lines, Windows 10 runs on any computer, from desktop systems, to laptops and tablet PCs, regardless of screen size, and it’s the most backward compatible Windows operating system ever made, with hardware requirements as low as 1GHz CPU frequency, and 4GB of RAM.
Considering that Windows 10 is served as a service, the concept of an end-of-support date seems a little odd, as Windows 10 is designed to be upgraded, if not indefinitely, well beyond the typical timetable of prior operating systems. Alas, October 2025 is the date set by Microsoft to end support for Windows 10.
The question is: what will happen as soon as Windows 10 is retired? There are a few theories in such regard. In consideration of what computers will be like in 2025, the possibility of Windows evolving into an online-only cloud-based service available to consumers over-the-air, is very real. Microsoft Windows is increasingly about ubiquity and compatibility, to a point where Microsoft is even incorporating notoriously competing platforms, right into Windows, including Ubuntu Linux, along with an increasing number of native shells and applications running within this subsystem.
Granted that including Linux into Windows is a move largely targeting application developers, the subsystem is available to anyone who want to try it, and it is fully operational.
Based on that, we can theorize that the next step in the evolution of Microsoft Windows won’t be necessarily about Windows itself, but more about features, compatibility and an ecosystem designed to reach as many devices and applications as possible, including IoT.