But Windows 7 isn't deprecated. Microsoft have committed to supporting it until 2020, and their customers will expect them to honour that commitment.

That is four years away. In a fast-paced industry like IT, the entire landscape could be different by then.

Why would Nadella get the boot? Look at their stock price since he's taken over: the company is doing great, much better than under Ballmer.

You and I seem to be looking at very different stock charts. In the one I'm looking at[1], MSFT had pretty respectable growth through 2013-2014 when they were doing a lot of talking about Windows 10 and the new vision, but their stock price looks much less happy since around the start of 2015 as the reality became known.

In a few months, if Windows 10 is still far less established than Windows 7 and it becomes undeniable that the campaign to get everyone onto Windows 10 didn't succeed even with literally giving it away and underhand tricks like the one we're talking about, executives like Nadella and Myerson are going to be under a lot of pressure to present a more realistic vision of what happens next and to turn the stock price back to a steady pattern of growth or their positions are going to be under threat.

[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT#symbol=MSFT

Why should MS care about what its customers want? It's not like they're going to abandon MS and Windows any time soon

Perhaps not. I suspect they've probably got until about 14 January 2020 before things get really bad.

But by that time, anything could have happened. Apple could have started competing more aggressively for desktop/laptop/server markets. Less and less business software could be locally hosted, making a range of different devices that can access web apps more attractive. In more than three years, even a major new player entering the market or a shift in strategy from some other tech giant isn't out of the question.

Screwing your customers for profit looks good at the next quarterly earnings call, but not so much two years or five years down the line when your customers and competitors have had time to react.

So what? They can change their mind at any time, and I for one hope they do. What are customers going to do, file a complaint? hahaha

>You and I seem to be looking at very different stock charts.

I don't know what you're looking at, but the Google chart I'm looking at for 2010-now shows constant growth, starting at about 2012 and really gaining steam in 2013, and continuing until now, albeit with some stumbling in the first half of 2015. Their stock price now is higher than it ever was in 2013-2014, and is in general going up.

>Apple could have started competing more aggressively for desktop/laptop/server markets. >...even a major new player entering the market or a shift in strategy from some other tech giant isn't out of the question.

Apple's been competing in those markets for decades, and they're still a tiny player. Linux beat them easily in servers. The idea of Apple servers is a joke. And MS servers are locked into many places in enterprises thanks to SharePoint, Exchange, AD, etc. and of course Windows on the desktop. Apple hasn't gotten anywhere on the desktop for businesses, and not much in homes either thanks to their high prices. I don't see that changing; Apple has always had high prices. Linux has been tried on the desktop for decades too (earnestly since around 1998), to little effect. And don't make me remind you about the fate of BeOS.

>Screwing your customers for profit looks good at the next quarterly earnings call, but not so much two years or five years down the line when your customers and competitors have had time to react.

You seem to be making the classic mistake of thinking MS is a normal company which has to worry about competition. It isn't. The only real threats they have to their business are 1) their old OS versions (which they're dealing with by pushing everyone to Win10 like it or not) and 2) the need for their products being made obsolete by new technology (like tablets). #2 seemed to be a concern for a while but it looks like the tablet market has gotten saturated and that's played out. There's too much stuff you just can't do on a tablet, so while some people can and have gone to all-mobile computing, everyone else is stuck with Windows, and they aren't going to stop using it no matter what. MS might as well take advantage of that as much as they can.

Maybe the law is different where you are. In my country, the public statements they have made about ongoing support would carry legal weight, and pulling that support several years early would be obvious grounds for legal action. Potentially they are on the hook for all kinds of nasty things, starting with undermining every consumer purchase of a system with the version of Windows that is no longer supported as promised.

I don't know what you're looking at, but the Google chart I'm looking at for 2010-now shows constant growth, starting at about 2012 and really gaining steam in 2013, and continuing until now, albeit with some stumbling in the first half of 2015. Their stock price now is higher than it ever was in 2013-2014, and is in general going up.

Well, you do know what chart I was looking at, because the link is right there in my last post. Go ahead and follow it, and press the 5Y button.

On that chart, you'll see that after a couple of stagnant years around 2011-2012 that ultimately brought down Ballmer, you can draw a pretty straight line through the stock price through 2013-2014, hitting close to 27, 37, and then 47 at the start of 2013, 2014 and 2015. At close yesterday, nearly six quarters dominated by Windows 10 news later, it stood at a touch over 50, after the most volatile period of trading in years going below 40 and above 55 at times but always some way below the previous levels of growth.

You're correct that the stock price today is higher than it ever was in 2013-2014. What you're glossing over is that it's a mere 1% or so higher than it was at the peak of the 2013-2014 gains, nearly 17 months later. That's not exactly impressive for a business with such a dominant history and supposedly a whole new strategy to recover from the missteps of the previous few years. About the only thing they have going for them lately is that they haven't tanked along with the overall US markets since the start of this year.

Apple's been competing in those markets for decades, and they're still a tiny player.

Which markets? In laptops they seem to have about 10% market share. They're on a comparable scale to any of the big Windows laptop manufacturers, something like 5th or 6th by volume of sales IIRC, presumably higher by revenue since they aim for the top end of the market. That's not nowehere on the desktop for businesses.

The thing is, though, we're talking about 3-4 years out here before Windows 7 runs out of support. If Apple wanted to make a play for the middle part of the market, maybe with a secondary brand, they easily have the financial resources, infrastructure and technical chops to do it.

The other vaguely plausible alternative is that another huge tech firm decides to actually give Linux clients a serious push. Obviously none of the current distros is going to do that; the only one with anything like the resources to make it happen is probably Red Hat, and their focus seems unlikely to shift from the enterprise/server market. But if you look at Android and to some extent Chrome OS and SteamOS, the potential for an unexpected sideways move to some new type of device is always there.

In any case, if the current trend towards outsourced IT and cloud services continues during that time frame, the advantages Microsoft retains in the corporate server room will erode over time, and with them the barriers to migrating to a completely different platform. Obviously it won't happen overnight, but it doesn't have to.