Approximately two-thirds of businesses in the UK are still using Windows 7, and not adequately prepared for its demise, ITPro Magazine reports.

Many enterprises across the pond are unaware that extended support for the aging operating system ends on Jan. 14, 2020, but I assume Windows 7 is still hovering in the background in the US and elsewhere, too.

Why is this happening? Did these companies ignore the free Windows 10 upgrade cycle? Can their equipment not handle the more powerful OS?

From my experience, Windows 7 was simplified and easy to get running, but broke much of what was good about Windows Vista. I was glad to dump it, despite my aversion to Microsoft's "tile"-centric Windows 8.

Microsoft dumbed down the GUI in Windows 7 to accommodate the screen of the future—your smartphone—but Windows Phone was late to the party and dead on arrival. With Windows 10, Redmond finally got a clue, swallowed its pride, and returned to a more normal desktop OS—the "last" version of Windows.

Marketing hype aside, that OS was released to the public in July 2015. It has been with us for three full years. It was free for months. Why hasn't everyone migrated by now? I have found nothing to indicate by any stretch of the imagination that Windows 7 is or was better.

It's been fascinating how the bad vibe, bad reception, bad marketing, and pretty much bad everything that Vista brought to the table stuck hard and defined the product. The problems Microsoft had with Vista came from the promises of incorporating all sorts of new ideas that the company could not deliver—including a new file system.

With Vista, Microsoft promised a file system called WinFS, which made the file system a database in and of itself. But Microsoft could not pull it off, irking the tech community. Vista never recovered.

Nowadays we are still waiting for something new. Microsoft has been playing around with a meta file manager ("meta" since you cannot boot from it) called ReFS for resilient file system. It's designed to beef up NTFS, which is seen as breakable and not fault-tolerant at all.

The point is that Microsoft is making a lot of incremental improvements. Anyone who started with a classic like Windows 2000, then left the brood for the Mac or a Linux rig, would like Windows 10. Anyone on Windows 7 would love Windows 10.

In the days of MS-DOS, Microsoft upgrades had a lot to do with the surrounding hardware. A double-sided floppy drive with high capacity would come along and you needed to upgrade DOS to the newest version written to accommodate the new hardware. People always kept up.

The reasons to upgrade nowadays are not the same. Microsoft has been unable to ever explain why you should adopt something newer. This is something the company needs to learn how to do because nobody should be running Windows 7.