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Comment by jamespo | Hacker News Reader

That was never an official MS statement, not that this makes the situation any better

It was said by somebody that works for Microsoft on stage at a Microsoft conference [1].

> “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,” Nixon continued. “And it’s really brilliant. So I can say things like, yeah, we’re working on interactive tiles and it’s coming to Windows 10 in one of its future updates, right.”

> Microsoft didn’t deny what Nixon said, but it also didn’t back up the “last version” of Windows, either.

For all reasonable intents and purposes "Microsoft" said this was the case then had to walk it back.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/394724/why-is-there-a-window...

No - one dev evangelist accidentally diverged from the marketing language for Windows 10, and now his words in a conference talk nobody previously cared about are being used as “proof” Microsoft lied. It’s like if Bob from accounting accidentally mentioned future plans on his LinkedIn years ago, then years later it’s being used as proof of the company going back on their words, despite them issuing a statement back then distancing from it. At some point, someone in a big company will say the wrong thing out loud and it needs to be carefully retracted without confirming or denying future plans.

End of that article: "give Nixon a break, too: He made an enthusiastic, throwaway comment that ended up being understood as company policy."

It was an announcement made by MS surrogates and it was promoted as true internally at MS, I personally head it through the grapevine from current MS employees. They really did try to get people to believe it as part of their billion devices push. I didn’t believe it because I know MS lies all the time, which is probably why they don’t make official statements about such things and generally work through surrogates.

Maybe next time they can create a poly market bet.

Let's say it was true. What does it even mean for users? macOS was on version 10 for something like 20 years. There were big changes in that time and compatibility for older hardware was dropped along the way.

Version numbers like this are arbitrary. They could have released Windows 11 as Windows 10 21H2 and it would have changed nothing about the scenario where some people can't update and their version would stop receiving security updates.

Even if it was true, 10 years is a long time. You can't trust anything any company says will still be true after 10 years - even if you have the same COE, their priorities and supporting executive team are likely to be different in 10 years.

I already said I didn't believe it for those reasons and others. It was a cynical lie to boost short term adoption that was clearly going to bite them in the ass later. Imagine if they now say Win11 will be the last version of Windows, no one would believe them and it would have no effect. The lack of trust creates problems in adoption of windows features, UI frameworks, App Stores etc. and this has very very negative consequences for the Windows ecosystem which is in a very sick state - I think maybe terminal. Also internally the internal departments lie to each other as well. Not even other departments will take dependencies and if you have no users for your features you lose the ability to justify funding - the perception becomes reality and a huge amount of effort and opportunity is wasted.

Apparently that quote comes from Jerry Nixon at a Build conference in 2015. This is kind of splitting hairs on what counts as "official".

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