Microsoft slashes Windows 10

Microsoft has slashed support from 10 years to just five for Windows 10 LTSC, the version the company once pitched to enterprises as the OS that foreswore constant updating.

In a Feb. 18 post to a Microsoft blog, Joe Lurie, senior product marketing manager, announced that the next iteration of Windows 10 LTSC, aka "Long-term Support Channel," will be released in the second half of this year.

That was expected: Almost two years ago, Microsoft said it would deliver another LTSC "toward the end of 2021."

What wasn't anticipated: The massive reduction in support. "Windows 10 Client LTSC will change to a 5-year lifecycle, aligning with the changes to the next perpetual version of Office," Lurie wrote.

Past editions of LTSC will be unaffected. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2015, 2016 and 2019 will get support until Oct. 14, 2025, Oct. 13, 2026, and Jan. 9, 2029, respectively. (Before 2019, Microsoft labeled this version of Windows LTSB, for Long-term Service Branch. Whether Branch or Channel, they all got at least a decade of support.)

When Microsoft launched Windows 10 and its twice-annual update regimen in mid-2015, the Redmond, Wash. company portrayed the long-term edition as the version closest to the then-standard Windows 7. Like Windows 7, Windows 10 LTSB would be supported for 10 years, with that stretch broken into the same two five-year segments, Mainstream and Extended, as its ancestral OS. The only regular updates it would receive would be monthly security fixes, just like Windows 7.

The original LTSB was clearly a sop to the critics who decried Windows 10's accelerated development and release tempo. That cadence of multiple releases each year — initially three annually, though Microsoft quickly pared that to a pair — was a shock to enterprises accustomed to upgrading Windows every three or more years. Microsoft softened the change by offering LTSB, which featured the slower cadence familiar to IT: Upgrades that appeared every three years or so, with little or no feature changes in between, and an update model that provided only security fixes.

Even at the start, Microsoft opined that LTSB was only suitable for a minority, made for special situations, such as machines that simply should not be frequently touched, like those that control industrial systems or ATMs. But there was significant talk among IT administrators about choosing LTSB for broad swaths of their PC holdings. Simply put, they weren't convinced of the need — or if they were, weren't ready — to bend to Microsoft's declaration that the operating system was suddenly a service.