Raising this dead article as Microsoft now delivers extended support pricing details for those who choose not to migrate to the newer version of Windows. The one they were told they’d not ever have to migrate to
It’s funny how media widely misreported this, but what’s not funny is that people believe that to this day. Even in this thread people think Microsoft said that.
The quote is in the article:
Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10,
They obviously meant Windows 10 is the latest version of Windows, but I guess misconstruing the quote got the clicks and then everyone went along. There was never any announcement from Microsoft, all of the “Windows 10 is the final version of Windows” thing is based on misconstruing the quote. If a reporter really believed this interpretation to be the case, it would be easy to just ask Microsoft, but they didn’t. Or did, got the “lol no of course it’s not last” answer and ignored it because that would make their clickbait article go away.
I don’t think that’s a fair interpretation, I think Microsoft absolutely intended what they said here, that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows. Hence the shift in development strategy. Annual breaking updates rather than new full releases, the new month-year versioning cycle, free for anyone with a valid Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 license.
I think the goal was to eventually drop the “10” and for it to just be Windows as a service, where major versions don’t really matter and the UX slowly evolves over time rather than in one big change.
Then, something happened. Obviously this is purely speculative, but I suspect either the executive championing this strategy left, or they saw it cutting into their profits more than they anticipated, or enterprises complained about frequent breaking updates, who knows. Then Windows 11 appeared out of nowhere. The signalling from MS for enterprise was clear. Stop monolithic imaging and site-wide rollouts, instead test applications with a pilot group and then push the annual releases wide if no issues are found.
I definitely think something changed. While you’re right that this is the only quote supporting it directly, when asked in follow-ups Microsoft went out of its way to NOT deny the statement or confirm it. If the plan was the status quo, they would have just said “we have not changed our release model at this time” but they didn’t. They knew full well that based on how widely reported that quote was, people would infer that it was the strategy. If they felt so strongly that it was just a simple misspeaking, they would have said so.
Windows 11 is technically still Windows 10, if you go by the actual version reported by the systeminfo command. For example, my fully updated Windows 11 Pro VM reports itself as OS Version: 10.0.22631, so there might still be something to the idea that “Windows 10 is the last version” but the marketing and branding teams didn’t stay on the same message.
