author: Bart Swiatek
German Government Will Pay for Extended Windows 7 Support
The German government will pay Microsoft nearly $900,000 to extend its support for Windows 7, all because officials failed to upgrade 33,000 computers to a newer version of the system before January 14 this year.
Microsoft recently terminated its support for Windows 7. This means that it will no longer receive security patches and that by using it, we may still be exposed to hacker attacks. However, some users will need more time to switch to another platform. In this group, we will find... the German government, which plans to pay the system's creators $887,000 for an additional year of support. The news was provided by the Handelsblatt newspaper.
The government of the Federal Republic of Germany is in the process of changing to the latest version of the system, but it was not able to update all computers on time (i.e. before January 14). It is not surprising if we take into account the number of machines still running W7 there - about 33 thousand. That's why the amount the Germans will pay the company from Redmond is so high.
Such a situation is possible thanks to the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, which Microsoft provides to corporate and business customers. Interestingly, if 12 months is not enough for officials to complete all the formalities and install Windows 10 on their computers, the support can be extended even more... but the fee will then double (and every subsequent year). I don't know about you, but $1.8 million fine would motivate me to hurry.