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During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.
"We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. "And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year.
↫ Tom Warren at The Verge
The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen.
Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on.
At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday December 03 2025, @08:40AM (12 children)
I never understood why Dell never attempted to make their own operating systems out of BSD or Unix, like Sony and HP. Or Apple.
They just assisted Microsoft in keeping the common population under crush, for decades.
Why users tolerate that? Probably, it's comfortable for them or even makes them feeling good...
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday December 03 2025, @10:18AM (2 children)
I never understood why Dell never attempted to make their own operating systems out of BSD or Unix, like Sony and HP. Or Apple.
It is because when the courts forced M$ to cease the illegal per-processor licensing fees [justice.gov], M$ pivoted immediately to similar requirements but dressed up as partnerships and advertising partnerships. The courts never caught up.
In short, the OEMs are under the belief that they must offer an option for pre-installed Windows. But in order to acquire the licenses at a cost which has a chance of being profitable, they must knuckle under to M$ demands that no other systems be provided or at least not made feasible to buy. Dell has had systems for sale with GNU/Linux pre-installed, but good luck at even finding them and fat chance at actually placing an order for one.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Thursday December 04 2025, @03:45AM
Well, earlier today I happened to wander past Dell's site, peered at some laptop, and noted that one of the OS choices was Ubuntu.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday December 04 2025, @07:59PM
I'm not sure that's correct. They have to offer a pre-install option for Windows if they sell machines with Windows because that's a tautology. The bigger issue is that it can cost money to support Linux for newbs and MS requires that every computer being sold by a licensed OEM be preloaded with something. Presumably under the excuse that they're bundling without paying.
Really, the whole thing is a pretty big scam as MS doesn't even provide discs any more and doesn't require that the OEM do so either.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by datapharmer on Wednesday December 03 2025, @10:20AM (5 children)
They did try offering an alternative once. They were going to offer BeOS as an option and Microsoft strong armed them out of it killing off a really good operating system in the process. Be sued and won but it was too late - only the lawyers ever saw anything of value from it.
Similar to what Microsoft did to Corel to kill WordPerfect by buying up their stock, getting a peak under the hood, making Word better and dumping them at the curb.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Wednesday December 03 2025, @11:12AM (4 children)
They did try offering an alternative once. They were going to offer BeOS as an option and Microsoft strong armed them out of it killing off a really good operating system in the process. Be sued and won but it was too late - only the lawyers ever saw anything of value from it.
The courts were not just slow, their remedies were about letting M$ keep doing what it had done to get into trouble in the first place:
With WordPerfect, M$ also engaged in price dumping. WordPerfect the word processor was about $200 and Borland's Quattro the spreadsheet was also about $200, thus the combined total was about $400 together. Around that time M$ started to bundle Word and Excel together for a sum of $199 for a few years until WordPerfect was sufficiently weakened and Quattro was more or less eliminated. Once they had the market locked up, M$ started making incompatible changes to the file formats with each new version, without patches to the old versions, to ensure that bumbling managers inadvertently forced their peers to buy the latest versions as a block so as to remain somewhat compatible.
They still do that even if the proprietary formats are an instance of XML. And, yes, XML is an open standard, but like what M$ does with it you can still use it to make proprietary implementations. And, no, not even M$ itself uses OOXML aka ISO/IEC 29500. And, no, M$ does not support the OpenDocument Format aka ISO/IEC 26300 though it will happily read those file while quietly deleting components of the documents. That M$ strategy goes back to the 1990s [justice.gov] as the single greatest threat to M$ control (monopoly) over desktop operating systems is not other operating systems per se but instead new software products that may support applications which can be used in conjunction with other operating systems. And those applications are controlled via the file formats. Once you have actual cross-platform interoperability, the horse is out of the barn and m$ has nothing to hold on with. In some ways, that is already happening because m$ client market share is far below the percentage needed to maintain an income from monopoly rents. Android and iOS made that happen.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday December 03 2025, @12:41PM (1 child)
I remember when Win95 came out and Microsoft was saying "It's compatible with 90% of existing software".. You know what didn't work? Competitors to Word and Excel. I don't remember what word processor I was running at the time but it had real issues under Win95.
Being the dumbest idiot in the land and president of the US should be 2 different people.
(Score: 3, Touché) by stormreaver on Wednesday December 03 2025, @02:50PM
Remember Microsoft's internal motto of the time: "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday December 04 2025, @08:23AM
Look at Teams vs Zoom now. Many corps are locked into M$'s walled garden.
Exchange + Shitpoint + Teams + Windows + Office.
Windows is a detail in that behemoth.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cereal_burpist on Saturday December 06 2025, @05:09AM
That link is no longer valid. I found this one that seems to summarize it:
https://www.justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.htm [justice.gov]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chucky on Wednesday December 03 2025, @10:41AM (2 children)
Dell once had their own “OS” called VMware. Their own Linux distribution too, Photon OS. But they failed miserably on company integration and sold it to Broadcom.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 03 2025, @08:33PM (1 child)
VMWare is a virtualisation/hypervisor system, is it not?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chucky on Wednesday December 03 2025, @10:58PM
Yes, it is, if you speak about ESXi. It installs on bare metal. When you connect to it, it looks like yet another Linux, though very single-purpose. But then all the other functions (e.g. vCenter or the UAGs for VMware Horizon), which run as VMs, use their own distro. That’s the Photon OS, which is a very stripped down Linux.