How much longer will Windows 10 live?

The idea that any IT project, particularly something as complex as a modern OS, can survive by patching or replacing modules was always for the fairies. This has been proved time after time since mainframes were invented.

Hardware cannot be future-proof and neither can software. As for building an OS using OOP, (which I assume Win 10 does), that is too funny for words. There was a reason for the creation of K & R "C" for Unix.

It would be interesting, given a lot of time and money and top-flight brains, to analyse how many changes to inherited modules undo previous mods earlier in their lives, because the programmers years later cannot possibly step back to an earlier version of a module and proceed from there. Too many other things have been done to it that other routines depend on.

Disaster is guaranteed. I believe it is rapidly approaching. Microsoft has already thrown in the towel over browsers, and Win 10 must be almost beyond maintenance by now. Even MS compilers must be a nightmare to support these days.

Bloatware ultimately self-destroys. The same applies to any sophisticated software. Either by failure, or being knocked out by an innovator.

See Digital Research; Wordstar; Supercalc; Ashton-Tate and many others. All effectively dead and buried, though some niche developments or spin-offs are around.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 18-Apr-21 12:18:00)

At this point the "10" of Windows 10 doesn't mean much, every Feature Update is essentially a new operating system. As such some old versions of Windows 10, such as 1511 and 1703 and 1709 are already end of life and completely unsupported by Microsoft, in the same way that Vista and 7 are unsupported.

Windows 10, indeed any version of Windows, is a mere babe in arms in the world of operating systems. You may have heard of a little one called UNIX that was first implemented in 1969 - 16 years before Window 1.0 appeared on the scene.

Rumour has it that not only is UNIX still going strong, but it runs the Internet.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

The idea that any IT project, particularly something as complex as a modern OS, can survive by patching or replacing modules was always for the fairies. This has been proved time after time since mainframes were invented.

I think the IBM mainframe (Z series) developers will disagree. z/VM and similar operating systems have been around for longer than some of the Unix systems.

Windows 10 is based on the NT design, not the DOS/Win3.x/Win95 design, and was designed by David Cutler formerly from DEC, whom designed VMS. There are similarilties in the design of VMS and WinNT which work well on networks of computers. Unix systems were designed originally for lots of users on ONE computer.

Digital Research; Wordstar; Supercalc; Ashton-Tate and many others. All effectively dead and buried, though some niche developments or spin-offs are around.

Most of those companies ran out of money by not moving with the times, or keeping users happy.

Digital Research created CP/M with Z80 and other processors, and then saw that overtaken by DOS and the march of the 8086 architecture. Wordstar was superceded by WordPerfect but neither managed the move to GUI. Supercalc was excellent in DOS days along with Ashton-Tate's dBase II, and dBase III, but then dBase IV was rubbish, and then FoxPro appeared and their business was over.

None of those companies failed due to lack of maintaining software.
None of those companies had to cope with a globally networked world.

Microsoft, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS operate in a always-on connected world, which legacy Unix, BSD and other systems did not have to worry about in the co-operative and friendly world of academic internet in 1970s.

Edited by jchamier (Wed 21-Apr-21 12:41:57)

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Rumour has it that not only is UNIX still going strong, but it runs the Internet.

The popular closed source Unix was Sun's and since the acqusition by Oracle (and increased prices) many organisations have migrated to Linux.

The various BSDs are very popular server platforms. Rather more stable and secure than Linux.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Digital Research; Wordstar; Supercalc; Ashton-Tate and many others. All effectively dead and buried, though some niche developments or spin-offs are around.

Most of those companies ran out of money by not moving with the times, or keeping users happy.

Yes. None of those systems failed because they were over-developed. The very opposite - they didn't continue development fast enough to keep up with consumer demand.

The same could be said of MS-DOS - too simple and limited rather than too complicated.