Though PCs sold with Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Ultimate editions will not be sold after October 31 of this year, Microsoft’s official “Windows life cycle fact sheet” page indicates that PCs that ship with Windows 7 Professional will continue to be sold after October 31, 2014.
Microsoft quietly updated the page without much fanfare, with Microsoft officials stating that incorrect information was posted on the page sometime in December. It’s worth nothing that all of the other information found on the page remains unchanged.
While Microsoft has officially put a halt to the sale of Windows 7 copies, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a copy. One only needs to head over to tech sellers like Newegg.com to see that multiple versions of Windows 7 are still very much available.
The extension of Windows 7 Pro sales comes after Microsoft announced that 200 million Windows 8 licenses have been sold since the polarizing operating system was released in October 2012. Though that might seem like a large number, it took 15 months for Windows 8 to reach that plateau, but only 12 months for Microsoft to move 240 million Windows 7 licenses.
Though Microsoft denied this, we wonder whether Redmond’s move to extend the sale of PCs with Windows 7 Pro is designed to encourage business users to buy a Windows 7 system once Microsoft halts support for Windows XP on April 8 of this year.
What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.
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