jih64
And that's fair enough to. But as for selling/paying for something, a 12 month membership for a product officially supporting something, I think it would also be fair enough to expect that product to officially support said something for that 12 months, but maybe that's just me.
This forum over-represents users who upgraded shortly after the membership model became available, so many, like you, will not have thought this issue through. There is no starting date for any annual/12 month membership cycle. It is a rolling start date that begins when the new user activates a 12 month pre-paid membership. New users are permitted to jump in any time, and the "end date" for each user's membership is staggered across the next year. So requiring Cakewalk to support anything through the end of the last joining user's 12 months keeps putting an end to support off ad infinitum. The best you could ask for is a clear announcement when you sign up for 12 months prepaid, that support for Windows 7 will end at a date certain. Ideally that would be after, rather than before the membership expires for users tied to using Windows 7. At any rate, with that knowledge, a new Win 7 user could opt to do a monthly update until that known expiration date. On the other hand, the perpetual license/sale model for software has never guaranteed that any particular software version would continue to run on newer OS versions, and the experience of most is that they do not, and for the most part the user's only option is to buy new software or continue to use an old OS.
If Cakewalk is not testing against Win 7 now, that would seem to indicate a significant erosion of support already. It does not necessarily mean that there will not be fixes for Win 7 specific bugs that surface after release of a monthly update. The fact that they are still listing Windows 7 as a minimum system requirement would seem to commit them to maintaining it on that OS.