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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: 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]