The end of Windows 7: a challenge of 250 million PCs for brands and manufacturers

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The End Of Windows 7
The End Of Windows 7

The end of Windows 7: a challenge of 250 million PCs for brands and manufacturers

The end of Windows 7 has come after 10 years of life. Starting today, Microsoft officially closes support for Windows 7 and for those who continue to use this version of Windows expect a gap in security updates and a huge warning from Microsoft when starting the PC for the computer to upgrade to Windows 10.

A market particularly affected by the Windows 7 EOL is the company market, both in terms of volume and the security consequences associated with maintaining Windows 7 as an operating system on their computers.

Windows 7: the operating system that resists dying

Despite the fact that five years ago that the standard support of Windows 7 ended and stayed exclusively with the extended one (which is based only on security updates ), its importance in the PC market is not trivial. Hence this EOL is especially critical.

Within days of its end, Windows 7 maintained a market share of over 25%

Until there were only six months left for the end of support for Windows 7, which is considered one of the most stable operating systems in the company and the last one without a key function as the integrated application store, remained above 45% of market share in laptops and desktops.

This solidity of such a veteran operating system has been especially suffered by Windows 10, which until the end of 2018 did not manage to exceed the market share of the system that now says goodbye.

Fee 2016 2018

Fee 2019

The reduction of Windows market share began to be evident from mid-2019. In those six months of the end of 2019, Windows 7’s share fell almost 10 points.

Despite this, in December 2019, a few days after the Windows 7 EOL, its market share according to Netmarketshare was still higher than 25%. Windows 10, with more than 900 million devices already active, barely got a 54% share.

End of life Windows 7

How the Windows 7 EOL affects the PC market

With an estimated fleet of Windows 7 computers of more than 200 million computers, both desktops and laptops, the PC market is no stranger to a point of no return as is the end of Windows 7.

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In the last six years, PC sales, except for very specific quarters, have suffered a very solid downward trend. However, the need to renew millions of equipment in a short time in the professional sector is going to be the main driver of the breakdown of that negative trend in sales both in 2019 and especially in 2020, according to analysts.

Laptop in company

The first significant upturn in the PC market occurred in the first quarter of 2018, confirmed in the second quarter with 2.7% growth in sales according to IDC and 1.4% according to Gartner, a company that includes Windows tablets with the keyboard. accessory but not Chromebooks. It came after a couple of quarters of 2017 with zero growth and that followed five years of reduced sales.

In the first half of 2018, while the consumer market fell 5% in sales, the business market grew 6% in the same period

This improvement in 2018 analysts associates it with a market of components that could finally provide at the pace that the market demanded and that was key to the renewal of equipment with Windows 7 in the world of the company. In EMEA, That period of 2018, while the consumer market reduced its sales by more than 5%, that of companies grew by more than 6% with this renewal of equipment.

But the good news for the PC sales market was not repeated in the last two quarters of 2018, where the downward trend in sales returned from the previous year with a drop of more than 4% according to Gartner, giving a global negative for 2018 above 1%.

The professional sector: the bulk of the switch to Windows 10 in 2019

With the 2019 release already a year away from the end of Windows 7, PC sales continued to decline globally. Only the three main companies (Lenovo, HP and Dell), with significant sales in the professional sector, offered growth data, which also allowed them to win the three global market shares.

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The same pattern was repeated in the second quarter of 2019, with Lenovo consolidating its first place and sales growth of more than 15% compared to the same period last year.

Both IDC and Gartner associate the growth of sales of the PC market in 2019 to the renewal of equipment in companies due to the end of Windows 7

But the confirmation of sales growth thanks to the renewal of computers due to the end of Windows 7 in the company would come in the third quarter of the year, negative or flat in the previous six years, and which grew between 1 and 3%. Both IDC through its vice president Linn Huang and Gartner with statements by its main analyst Mikako Kitagawa, give the Windows 7 EOL as a trigger for that growth.

In Spain, IDC data also corroborates the push of the business market. In 2019, the PC market in Spain was expected to represent a global sales of 3.2 million units sold, representing a decrease of 1% compared to the previous year. But the distribution by markets is very different.

While the consumer one (51% of market share in Spain) reduced its sales by 6%, the company was expected to increase its distributed units by 6%, largely caused by this renewal of equipment in the field of the company. For 2020, expectations are even better and IDC predicts annual growth of 2% for Spain.

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The effect of the Windows XP EOL also affected the natural sales cycle of the PC market, but with much less impact. In fact, between the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, just reaching the end of Windows XP, PC sales continued to be negative compared to previous years, although the catastrophic forecasts with setbacks of more than 6 points were finally softened by the renewal of equipment. , although without improving sales.

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The end of Windows 7 is smoothed out for businesses

This slightly positive PC data is being produced despite the fact that the renovation conditions are not ideal due to the shortage of components in the market, as two giants such as Dell and HP have warned in the presentation of results for the last quarter of 2019: Renewing the equipment fleet is not easy for companies beyond the cost it may entail.

Both HP and Dell point to Intel as the responsible party that this transition through equipment renewal has not yet taken place.

Dell computer windows 10

With so little time to renew equipment and with the problem of shortage of components, companies are looking for other solutions. The most logical: keep the current hardware but migrate to Windows 10.

It is one of the solutions proposed by Steve Fieler, Chief Financial Officer of HP. Companies have the option of updating their current Windows 7 computers to Windows 10, which still offer technical specifications that are within the minimum recommended by Windows 10.

Upgrade to Windows 10 companies

In the case of companies, switching to Windows 10 is easier and even free according to the contracted plans. Microsoft 365 Business service teams have a free upgrade to Windows 10 Pro at no additional cost.

Businesses have the option to purchase security updates for Windows 7 Pro and Enterprise PCs from Microsoft until January 2023

There are also facilities, if necessary, to keep Windows 7 computers functional, including security updates. Microsoft will provide them until January 2023 if purchased by businesses for their Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise computers.