In In a recent blog post titled 'Improving the setup experience,' Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live Division, has hinted that the company's upcoming Windows 8 will be able to run on older systems.
"In the past that often had to do with increasing system requirements in new Windows releases, and the need to purchase new PCs with more power to run the new version. With Windows 7 however, we made a commitment to work on many more existing PCs by keeping system requirements low and maintaining compatibility. Weve continued that commitment with Windows 8, so many of you with existing PCs can simply upgrade. Looking just at Windows 7 customers, there are currently more than 450 million PCs that will be able to run Windows 8, but we expect that many systems running Windows Vista and even Windows XP will also be eligible," he notes in the blog.
This might come as welcome news for a lot of enterprises and users still making do with older systems, as they can now look forward to using the new software without having to junk what they bought.
Of course, it makes equal business sense for Microsoft to try and support older systems because the company has been facing competition from cloud-based and open-source alternatives to its software in recent times.
Especially in a country like India, which is "notorious" for squeezing the last bit of computing from each piece of silicon, the continuous cycles of software-hardware upgrades have become unattractive to a lot of businesses. For instance, in sectors such as government and education, open-source and thin-client computing seem to be gaining ground - alternatives that are considered cheaper and more future-proof compared to Windows-based machines.
Sinofsky said his company took note of the typical customer behaviour. "During planning for Windows 8, we wanted to hear from customers who chose not to upgrade to Windows 7 even though their PCs would run it," he wrote in the blog.
It seems Microsoft is taking customer feedback pretty seriously. Let's see how things turn out when the software is launched (next year?).
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