I've put my toe in that water as well.

Having 'grown up' in the balkanized era where there were a dozen computer manufacturers with different architectures, different OS's and even different character sets, I appreciate how having a common platform provides a market for those of us who want to make a living developing applications.

It's an interesting dilemma. I like competition but want a standard platform so I don't have to have a dozen variations on my product and staff to support them. Currently it's split Windows/Mac but the Mac market is small enough that it's relatively safe to ignore it.

Over the last twenty years we've probably lost two sales because the customer was determined to have a "Macintosh Shop". I have no idea how many we would have lost had we gone Mac, but I think it's a lot. One of our significant competitors started out with Macs and still uses an apple as part of their logo but long ago transitioned to PCs. They must have found it a disadvantage to go to that much effort.

Just be careful and try to keep track of what patches come down so if you cannot start it, you know where to start. The infinite boot loop "update" they did was enough to make me not touch it for a while, on top of all the privacy questions.

True, but stability is also based on manufacturers palying nice with Windows and vice versa, I have too often had catastrophic crashes from driver updates, etc. I lost one whole install because of the GeForce Experience, so I don't update the driver until 6 months later, just to see what issues it has.

I do understand MSFT's architecture problem, and I have defended them here on that issue in the past. I am doing Android development now.

Well, the article says Win 7 support will continue until 2020. So, if it is that bad, you would think they wouldn't. Unless there is some legal reason. XP was functional, it's just that, if hooked up to the web, there may be a lot of loopholes in it now, that can be exploited. But a good firewall is always better than trusting MS to close all the doors they ventilate their software with.

Realistically, what other choice do you have? You can go with Apple but that will definitely narrow the market of companies who are willing to use your product -- and raise the price of doing so.

You could go with Linux but that's a support nightmare since you have no clue what version and what patches are present. Plus, once again, many companies won't want to implement it.

I'm not sure how 'stable' it is possible for a system as large as a modern operating system can be. Of course Microsoft has it harder than Apple because there are vastly more architectures to support.

I do understand having to be able to run your product on W10. Stopped developing for windows some years ago partly for personal reasons, partly because MSFT's bugs kept me from having stable products .

I actually like Vista, in fact I'm using it right now on my home machine. I recently replaced my work computer with a new running Windows 7. After some debate, I let it upgrade to Windows 10 last week. Since I do software development and our product runs on the Windows platform I decided that, like it or not, I had to move up.

Standing ovation for the author of this article.
Thanks nick for posting it.

W7 isn't as good as XP was in many ways, most notably W7 has an inferior interface, but W7 is supposedly superior in other ways, notably stability.
W10 has few current advantages over W7 and a very significant disadvantage in privacy which is likely to get worse over time as MSFT tries to milk the customer by destroying the customer's privacy. Ignorant (most notably younger) customers will allow MSFT to legally steal their privacy because they are too ignorant (or just too stupid) to realize that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Linux will very likely be the next OS for me.
MSFT has been alienating the core of their success for a generation and I predict that will not change.