Microsoft has officially pulled the plug on the retail sales of Windows 7 and Windows 8.
So you can no longer get a Windows 7 PC, which comes with the OS pre-installed.
This only affects regular consumers, and Businesses can continue to purchase PCs with a Windows 7 Professional downgrade option. What this really means is that, regular folk like us will only be able to buy retail copies of Windows 8.1 from now on. It is not just a marketing move from Redmond based company to push the sales of Windows 8.1, it is actually their typical end of sales schedule (as seen in the screenshot above). It is still facing a struggle to convince Windows XP users to abandon the Operating System, even after it’s end of life support in April 2014.
Microsoft had also announced that it is discontinuing mainline support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2015. This does not mean the end of support or end of life for the 5 year old OS. The Company will provide security updates for an additional five years, i.e until January 14, 2020. Microsoft did support XP for 13 years, so it may not come as a surprise if the company has a change of heart towards it’s second most popular Operating system.
via, source