Office 2019 to support Windows 10 ONLY (but also MacOS)

[Maticks]

Microsoft took a page out of Apple’s book. seem they were courageous enough to remove Windows OS support for a product.

[yian88]

On 2/6/2018 at 9:38 PM, GoodBytes said:

Disagree. the proper OS to install on a business environment is CentOS, and that is years behind Windows. You can't even shift+click on a running process to open another instance of it, as an example. Open source is not an advantage... it means official releases are really betas releases.. hence why you want CentOS instead.

 

Usually, hacking is not the problem of the OS, but rather weak passwords, lack of data encryption on sensitive data in databases, human configuration errors, etc.

 

KDE is junk of a mess of widgets, open to screwing up everything, and difficult to restore. Gnome is far closer to Windows than KDE. And with an OS with 0 recovery systems in place, not even bring back the system in time, it is a huge problem.

 

Modularity of Linux provide what advantage? Save 200MB on their 1TB drive? yay?!

 

Wine is not an option in the enterprise as the software has 0 support under it.

Well if you want some proper arguments against linux you can get them here https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

 

These are the reasons i still use windows 7 and worried about the singularity past 2020 when win7 goes out of support, a plethora of vulnerabilities pop up and no OS to switch to. Windows has less than 2 years of life left and thats so dissapointing and worriyng, ofcourse one can risk still using it after like XP but yeah, we cant do that forever, if it werent for fucking drivers issues it would have been worth starting an OS from scratch at least for x86_64 exlcusive, but without software support you cant rebuilt/reverse engineer everything.

The situation looks grim from my view, linux is like beating a dead horse, and windows7  platform is on its way out, we need a software miracle.

[DrMacintosh]

Office for Mac, lol, unless your workplace requires it you are better off using Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. 

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, DrMacintosh said:

Office for Mac, lol, unless your workplace requires it you are better off using Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. 

How so? Compatibility with Office files is hit or miss.

 

If you're doing it for home use, as in, typing up stuff for just you, or stuff you're gonna print anyway, and not share with other users? Sure, no problem.

 

But a student or employee would be far better off just buying Office for Mac, so that they have both options.

[DrMacintosh]

47 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Compatibility with Office files is hit or miss.

Depending on the fonts used and if the document used Microsoft’s horrible media formatting then it should be fine. 

 

[dalekphalm]

3 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Depending on the fonts used and if the document used Microsoft’s horrible media formatting then it should be fine. 

 

So in other words "Depending on a bunch of stuff you can't depend on".

[vanished]

1 hour ago, DrMacintosh said:

Office for Mac, lol, unless your workplace requires it you are better off using Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. 

In a vacuum, perhaps.  TBH IDK so I can't comment.  But in an office space, I'm gonna say no since Office is very common and despite its other issues, compatibility is king.

[Sauron]

On 6/2/2018 at 7:54 PM, SilkyDistress said:

Their forcing on Windows 10 is just gonna make people and enterprises switch to Linux. Why is the even idea Windows 10 on all PC's I am not going from Windows 8.1 (even our company is using Windows 7 Ultimate on Kaby Lake CPU's). That idea is not gonna go well, It will distrupt a lot of companies and enterprises and I personally think this is great time to switch to Linux to show Microsoft that they are doing many things wrong.

Well... switch to linux and use what instead of ms office? Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and I wish it were much more popular, but this isn't really going to change the reasons offices don't use it. Old Linux packages are notorious for breaking with kernel and UI upgrades and a 9 year old distro is unlikely to run any new package properly, so I don't think that is the solution to the "we don't want to upgrade our os but we want all the new software to run on it" problem. I don't think it's that ludicrous to expect your customers to upgrade OS once every 10 years. And yes, they could at least support 8.1 just because it's more recent, but aside from the fact that the install base of 8 and 8.1 is pretty low this sort of thinking is what causes many of windows' problems to begin with. Retrocompatibility is its strength and its bane.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Meh. Office 2010 is still a capable Office Suite so 2013 and 2016 would be plenty for current Windows 7 users. 

[Sfekke]

Another way they try to get Windows 7 out the door.

I bet someone finds a way to bypass the check or spoof it.

Wondering if it'd work on Windows 10 Enterprise? As that is another SKU all together, it probably does though.

[ShredBird]

15 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Just so that we are on the same page. The things you listed as reasons why Windows 10 is more secure than Windows 7 are:

1) Secure Boot support.

2) VBS

3) Forced updates

4) The Edge browser

5) Anti-virus built in.

 

Is that correct? I know you mentioned some other things such as "paradigm shift in design" but since that is very vague I don't think that counts (unless you can elaborate on it more of course).

 

The first two are legitimate features which improve security. I think number 3-4 aren't though, and number 5 is a big stretch.

 

Forced updates does not offer any more protection that just updating in general, which most people had enabled in Windows 7 too. The ones that were usually behind with Windows 7 updates were companies, and the forced update policy of Windows 10 does not apple to them. They still have full control over updates just like they did with Windows 7 (through WSUS). So in practice not much has changed, other than force "power users" to do workarounds like disable the entire update service rather than just not installing updates.

 

The inclusion of edge does not increase security because IE is still included. That is what increasing attack surface means. Instead of having one browser to attack, you now have two. Attackers now has both IE and Edge to look at for potential security holes, while they used to only have one. That means the attack surface is increased, not reduced. Also, IE and Edge shares a lot of code and are fairly often vulnerable to the same attacks.

 

Built-in anti-virus is a stretch because that only offers extra protection to people who did not have an anti-virus before. That might be some (stupid) people, but it does not offer for example me any extra security.

 

 

None of the things you mentioned reduces the attack surface.

When I say attack surface I mean this:

Each new feature or function which gets introduced in a system increases the attack surface.

That's one of the reasons why there have been more publicly know vulnerabilities disclosed for Windows 10 than Windows 7. Here is the number of vulnerabilities found in Windows 7 vs Windows 10 each year since Windows 10 was released. Please note that Windows 7 have had more users than Windows 10 up until very recently as well, so this has nothing to do with "people are looking into Windows 10 more than they are Windows 7!"

 

2015 (please note that Windows 10 was only out for 5 months during 2015):

Windows 7 - 174

Windows 10 - 53

 

2016:

Windows 7 - 134

Windows 10 -172

 

2017:

Windows 7 - 229

Windows 10 - 268

 

2018:

Windows 7 - 7

Windows 10 - 11

 

It's also worth noting that a lot of the Windows 7 vulnerabilities are shared with Windows 10. So a vulnerability that works on Windows 7 often works on Windows 10 as well, but a vulnerability for Windows 10 quite often doesn't work on Windows 7.

Please keep in mind that these are just publicly disclosed vulnerabilities though, and that the number of vulnerabilities are not an indicator of how quickly they were fixed or how serious they were.

I think this illustrates the fact that Windows 10 has a larger attack surface than Windows 7 quite clearly though.

 

 

Anyway, I don't think your post proves anything. You can list a lot of things which can increase security in theory, but how successful they are at stopping attacks is very much dependent on how common the attacks they stop are, how well implemented the features are, and that they don't introduce even more serious security holes than the ones they are trying to fix.

 

Measuring security is far more complicated than just looking at a product and going "OS 1 has features X, and OS 2 doesn't, so therefore OS 1 is more secure".

Very astute reply and I rescind my initial point as it may not be clear whether it's more secure or not.

 

I mentioned Edge simply because they've introduced some hypervisor sandbox modes that can be enforced via policy which I think is awesome.  I really don't know why they included IE in Win10.

 

I want to clarify the difference between automatic and forced updates.  On Win 7 you could delay updates indefinitely whereas Win10 will eventually just do it.  So for some users, this reduces the window for which they are unprotected from patched exploit.  An anecdotal data point, but I know many people who delay their OS security updates constantly just out of inconvenience.  Win10 will eventually just say "that's it, we're doing this, ready or not reboot." You're right that policy for a corporation can override this, but for the general public this is a good thing. The example I think of is Android and how long it takes security patches to reach people if at all and what an adverse effect that has had.

 

As for the vulnerabilities list, it isn't clear what the ease at exploiting the vulnerabilities are and if they are actively being used so the number alone doesn't paint a clear picture.  Again, the difference between is vulnerable and is being exploited.

 

I guess I just lean towards MS as they are trying to get people to move toward the MS app store and UWP apps specifically because VBS is in place there.  They are attempting to be proactive about what and how code is executed and bake more security in and I don't think it's necessarily wrong to attempt to nudge the market in that direction.  Office is one the top exploited pieces of software and maybe a UWP VBS protected version would do a lot of good.  I can only speculate.