[deburo]

Indeed, Win7 being good enough and not degrading in any way is a big challenge facing Win10 adoption, and that has been said times enough before. Once Win7 is out of support, may it be from popular applications or simply security updates, we may see things changing.

There's also the factor of familiarity to consider. People buying new machines will learn the new system, and overtime as they learn how to use it, they will prefer it to older system versions. However, this is another long-term factor, and as such Windows 10 seems doomed to only slowly gain adoption.

Note:

Considering the reputation Windows 10 got for itself at launch, this is less surprising. For non-technical users, the upgrade to Win10 has probably been pointless or frustrating: new concepts, new default applications and system UIs these users have learn to perform their ordinary tasks. What's more, for many users, upgrading their system to Win10 left them with an unusable machine. Win10's launch was a mess.

[chinathrow]

Some say Windows 2000 was good enough already. Everything worked well.

[godzillabrennus]

Windows 2000 was the best version I've ever used. Back in the day, when XP was relatively new, if I bought a machine and it came with XP I would try and retro fit 2000 onto it. The 2000 installation would be noticeably faster for what appeared to be a similar set of features.

[deburo]

Currently checking the history of Windows 2000. Seems W2K was aimed at enterprises while ME at consumers. A bit less than 2 years after W2K's launch, WinXP came out and unified the consumer and enterprise line.

Then, almost 8 years after WinXP's launch, MS released Win7. There's a lot of improvements between the 2, but I wonder what were the major factors that made users upgrade to Win7. I only remember a few pain points in XP that were relieved in Win7: file/app search, connecting to the internet, system updates, and window management.

[antisthenes]

Personal reasons for upgrading to 7 in order of importance:

64-bit memory space support (crucial, considering enormous browser bloat after the FF 3.5 era)

TRIM support for SSDs (I switched to 7 when consumer SSDs started to become affordable)

DX11+ for gaming (DX10 was a wash in Vista, but by the time I switched to 7, there were some games that actually did look noticeably better with DX11)

Half-Open connection fix for torrenting.

But I'm a power user, so reasons for regular users may vary.

[pcunite]

I upgraded to Windows 7 over XP for mainline x64 support and new window management feature (aero snap). Also, being able to sort system tray icons, as well as the taskbar were very welcome.

[tim333]

I upgraded from XP to 7. For me the main plus was stability - with XP you had to reinstall from an image when it got screwed up quite regularly.