Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears With days to go before Microsoft finally pulls the plug on Windows 10 support, there are hundreds of millions of computers that have yet to upgrade to Windows 11, despite the best efforts of hardware manufacturers and the operating system's marketers. On October 14, Microsoft will issue the final updates and security fixes, …
Can you imagine having 550 million unhappy customers!
I mean. Out of the context of being employed by Microsoft. ;o)
The company I work for has essentially 100% similarly unhappy customers.
None of them want to upgrade to our 2.0.
They have working systems. The vast majority not connected to the Internet. And they want their code on these systems to continue working because their business has not changed and these forced upgrades are simply considered a rip off. Security, being touted as the reason the "have to" upgrade.
Despite happily running other systems of ours, sometimes 30 years past the managlement announcing official end of life.
They are right. Forced upgrades are a rip off. I wish out company would not do it. We have to look people we work with in the face at meetings while management tell this reoccurring lie. Our version 2.0s are as unwelcome as a new windows version on a working PC.
I think people should sue. It's a standard lie, but still it's fraud.
It not that they don't want to pay. They don't want to pay for 2.0 with "AI" support and 20gb of bundled bullshitware they do not need and only causes them headaches while hardware long out lasts the support contract and is still easily replacable with something faster and equivalent for their needs. .
Capitalism is failing us, because honesty is not a legal requirement.
"Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day near"
This is 100% the fault of Microsoft for breaking their promise that Windows 10 would be the last ever version of Windows. In addition to Microsoft's own scheme, anti- virus and malware companies will still be offering support to Windows 10 users for a few years yet. It is also possible to convert some theoretically unsuitable computers to Windows 11, eg with the help of computer specialists. It would also be possible to convert one of the Linux varieties or Chrome OS Flex.
From an environmental perspective, I think what Microsoft is doing is deeply irresponsible.
In addition to Microsoft's own scheme, anti- virus and malware companies will still be offering support to Windows 10 users for a few years yet.
And tell us exactly how antivirus and malware companies will fix Kernel Level security vulnerabilities in Windows 10?
Not even the fine folks of https://0patch.com can do so...
This is where regulators should act, but they won't. Why? Most governments are dependent on Microsoft services.
I work for a regulator in this very field, and therefore can give you the correct answer. When legislation on WEEE was written, all the obligations were upon hardware producers or distributors to ensure routes were available for responsible disposal when kit reached end of life. Nobody at that time considered that a major software supplier might intentionally act in a way to cause millions of PCs to become earlier candidates for electronic waste. There are rules on right to repair that cover spare parts availability for some appliances, they don't apply to most tech gear, and are written around the idea of hardware availability. Even if government now used secondary legislation* to amend either WEEE regulations or Ecodesign regs, it would be quite exceptional (and therefore unlikely) that the rules could be retrospective. The cyber security bill going through parliament might have new provisions (or less helpfully, new interpretations by the courts) but again, won't be retrospective.
* Secondary legislation is the fastest way government can pass new laws, but can only be done if a secretary of state has been granted those powers for a specific piece of primary legislation. Look it up if you want to know more.
it would be quite exceptional (and therefore unlikely) that the rules could be retrospective.
The big wigs have ability to reframe retrospective legislation in a way they can argue it is not. There is already a precedent in the UK called Loan Charge.
The government argued the Loan Charge wasn't retrospective because the underlying tax liability always existed; the schemes were always a form of tax avoidance. The legislation didn't create a new tax on a past event; it created a new consequence for a present failure to settle an old, unresolved debt.
We can apply the same logic here. A software provider that embeds its product so deeply into society's infrastructure accrues an implicit "environmental debt." This is the foreseeable cost of disposal when that product is eventually withdrawn. The liability has always been there, simmering under the surface; it just hasn't been codified or collected.
The argument is no longer about the one-time act of "pulling the plug." It's about the ongoing and persistent state of environmental and security risk that a company is actively maintaining.
The legal precedent (drawing from the Loan Charge) is that you can legislate against a present and continuing condition, even if that condition was initiated by past actions. The Loan Charge didn't penalise the act of taking out a loan in 2005; it penalised the state of that loan being outstanding in 2019.
Similarly, our legislation wouldn't penalise Microsoft for ending support on October 14, 2025. It would impose a levy based on the continuing failure, from this day forward, to remedy the situation.
The law would introduce a new "Duty of Care for Digital Lifecycles" applicable to providers of "Systemically Important Software."
The Principle: Where a provider's software is integral to the functioning of millions of hardware devices, that provider has an ongoing duty of care not to knowingly render that hardware dangerously insecure or prematurely obsolete.
The Triggering Condition (not event): The law would apply to any company whose software meets these criteria today:
- Is operating on over 'X' million devices in the UK.
- Is no longer receiving critical security updates from the provider.
- and where the provider fails to offer a direct, first-party, and functionally equivalent upgrade path that maintains compatibility with the ecosystem for which the original product was sold.
The "Remedy or Pay" Clause: This is the crucial part. The legislation doesn't simply impose a fine. It creates an ongoing liability that the company can choose to switch off. The provider is liable for a monthly or annual environmental levy for every device in this unsupported state, unless they take remedial action. This gives them a way out. Remedial actions could include:
Option A: Reinstating free Extended Security Updates (ESUs).
Option B: Funding a national WEEE take-back scheme specifically for the devices they have made obsolete.
This approach sidesteps the retroactivity problem by focusing on a future corporate action, not a past transaction. It makes the software giant responsible for the direct consequences of its present-day decisions, forcing it to internalise the enormous environmental externality it is about to create.
Unfortunately, this idea would collapse under the weight of a brown envelope.
"Unfortunately, this idea would collapse under the weight of a brown envelope."
No it would collapse under the weight of bad logic. There's several things you offer that qualify, but consider the biggie: The overwhelming majority of these PCs of which we speak are still perfectly serviceable, and could in a matter of minutes be running a competent, supported alternative OS, with a full range of "productivity" applications and largely for free. All that MS have done is after due notice told users that it may not (depending on jurisdiction and entitlements) be offering further support on their software. Should change averse luddites be entitled to free software updates for longer than a commercial company deems fit under the EULA that is a (mostly) legally binding contract that all users have agreed to? You argue that Microsoft should be held accountable for the costs of obsolescence of hardware made by other people and sold by other people, and where said obsolescence is crystallised by the users/asset owners who can't be arsed to investigate and install software.
I don't defend MS decision on W11 compatibility, but are you really arguing for yet more regulation in the UK simply because people want to spoon fed their Windows OS?
Thank you for the detailed critique. While you raise some valid points from a purely technical and contractual perspective, I believe this view fundamentally misunderstands the scale of the issue and misattributes the responsibility.
The idea that millions of everyday users can or should simply install a new operating system is a convenient fiction for the technically literate, but it ignores reality for the overwhelming majority of the public.
A person doesn't buy "a PC"; they buy a "Windows PC." They buy it to run the specific software, use the specific peripherals, and interact with the specific interface they know. Expecting them to migrate to and learn a completely different ecosystem that might not even support the software they purchased to use with Windows is unreasonable.
The proposed legislation rightly focuses on the functionally equivalent ecosystem the user bought into, not the theoretical capabilities of the raw hardware.
Pointing to the EULA is a classic defense, but it's irrelevant when an action creates a catastrophic negative externality. No contract gives a company the right to cause billions of pounds in public harm.
If a chemical company's contract allowed them to dump millions of tons of toxic waste into the Thames, we wouldn't say, "Well, the contract allows it." We would rightly say the law must intervene to protect the public good. The creation of millions of tons of e-waste and the exposure of millions of citizens and businesses to critical security risks is the digital equivalent. Regulation exists precisely to address situations where private contracts impose huge public costs.
The core of your argument is that the user is the one who "crystallises" the obsolescence. This is a profound misreading of cause and effect.
The obsolescence is caused by one single, deliberate, and predictable action from a market-dominant entity. Microsoft's decision is the proximate cause. The user's inability to undertake a complex technical migration is merely the foreseeable consequence.
This isn't a niche issue affecting a few "change averse luddites." It affects tens of millions of people in the UK alone - including schools, hospitals, small businesses, and the elderly—who lack the time, money, and technical expertise to perform this task.
To frame this as "spoon-feeding" is to miss the point. The argument is not that users should be shielded from all change. It is that a single commercial decision should not be allowed to generate a nationwide environmental and security crisis that the public is then forced to pay for.
A lot of your reasoning boils down to you considering this problem a really big one, so the rules should be different. I agree with you that this is a really big change, but the regulations don't change with the size of things going down because, as I said in another comment, there's no regulation about this in the first place, the closest you can get is consumer protection, and consumer protection doesn't cover this anyway because it has been too long since Windows 10 was released to be covered under most of it.
Let's also consider what that regulation can be. If you concede or even just ignore for a bit that regulators can't regulate without a law giving them the power and the reasoning, what would we want that new law to say so they can do it? It will probably be too late for Windows 10, but we can write it for the next time. My problem is that I can think of a lot of laws that cover something like this but Windows wouldn't be included. For example, one of the things I think we can argue against is the nontechnical obsolescence of technical things. For example, when Apple cuts off a Mac model because that's the end, I don't consider that legitimate if they've got another model with the same or worse hardware which gets to update. We could make that illegal. That would not affect Windows 10 because those restrictions are technical ones. I don't think they are good ones, but they are quite normal technical requirements. If you write code which only works with a TPM 2.0 chip, it is reasonable to require that you have one to run it. To cover this, we would have to do something a lot blunter like simply announcing that an operating system must have support for twenty years, no exceptions, which while possible as a law, has a lot of downsides that a more nuanced one would not.
That’s the point: it’s the sheer scale of the problem. But whether it’s technical or not is pretty much irrelevant to my mind. If there are (say) 200,000 8-year-old Macs out there that are not getting ANY more updates (and the older ones still do actually get security updates), then that’s a relatively small problem. If there 400 Million PCs out there that will stop getting updates, that’s no longer relatively small. There should be laws making sure that “gatekeeper” orgs like MS, Apple, Samsung etc keep updates going for a long time. That time should vary depending on the type of device, and how many of them are out there. These companies really need to have some sense of the corporate responsibility involved in producing devices used by enormous numbers of people.
Scale can determine how much you care, but it isn't currently and, in my opinion, probably shouldn't be relevant to what the law is. We can't decide that there's a regulation that stops this because the problem's big; there still isn't. That could be a good reason for some politicians to make a law when they didn't care before, but the first step would be to try to make them care.
If you do, I think it's important to decide what you think that law needs to be. You need to define how the responsibility works, how long updates need to be for, how you would restrict them, etc. For example, I think that smartphones and computers both last a long time, so I'm still more annoyed at Android's short lifetimes than I am with Windows's which are at least twice as long and often more, although I'm quite annoyed with both. Both have similar scales, with hundreds of millions of Android phones losing security updates each year. Yet we don't see complaints about those, probably because that's always happened whereas Windows is getting this all at once. If we're passing a law, we need to decide whether those two get the same regulation or if they should be treated differently, and if it's the latter we need to define what makes the difference. These details are important if you don't want a gap in the law making it possible for this to happen again. If you are mandating updates, you have to decide the conditions when it is justifiable for updates to end. That is why I brought up the technical perspective because, when I decide about the updates for stuff I build, my reason for cutting them off is nearly always technical and that is the most justifiable reason in my mind.
> ...you considering this problem a really big one.
No, the problem is actually a tiny, tiny one: a simple (and clearly unwarranted) decision by a convicted monopolist. It is the consequences of that problem which are "really big". The consequences of the cost to the user in financial terms, in stress, in inconvenience and wasted time, etc.; the consequences of the cost to the wider world in e-waste, in additional resource consumption, etc.
In order for regulators to act, there would need to be regulation. There isn't. That is why Android devices have always expired earlier than that, why Chrome OS death dates were shorter than that until Google's latest change made them about equal, why Macs get seven years before the Mac OS updates stop. Microsoft has, before this, been an outlier for long update lifetimes. Perhaps because of this, the people who would have to make the regulations haven't done it, and without them, regulators can't do anything about it.
"This is 100% the fault of Microsoft for breaking their promise that Windows 10 would be the last ever version of Windows."
They didn't 'promise' this - some middle-ranking member of staff made a passing comment in a presentation that it would be the last version of Windows. That was it - nothing in writing, nothing ever confirmed by senior staff. Clearly the person who said it has been proved wrong.
I don't agree with what Microsoft is doing - they could easily have made W11 so that it would work on older hardware too - but this constant "they promised" gets wearing. No they didn't.
I remember that - it was back in 2015 at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon said the following:
”Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10.” and that the future is “Windows as a service.”
If those statements were incorrect then Microsoft should have issued a correction notice.
I think MS have denied it was an official policy statement.
It's taking them a bit longer to get Windows as a service in place but you can have Windows 10 as a service. All you have to do is pay for extended cover this year, more for extended cover next year etc.
Once you get used to that Windows 12 will be along as a subscription only service.
And D-Day itself is actually mid-November when the next updates would normally have appeared. And they still will for millions in the EU thanks to consumer protection law, which we're going to come to appreciate again and again over the next few years as Microsoft tries to use Windows 11 to force its services on an unsuspecting world.
It's difficult not to see the whole episode as intimidation with many users understandably worried enough to put pressure on management for new machines. But this has been compounded with Microsoft regularly moving the goalposts over what counts as "Windows 11" compatible so that many machines that could have been bought with Windows 11 installed, are now no longer considered suitable.
Now machines bought in 2020 or 2021 can be considered EOL by many businesses – the costs will have already written off – but the costs associated with new hardware outside of any planned replacement can be considerable*. This is presumably the taste of things to come with Microsoft keen for us to be running its AI software on our machines – why should we bother ourselves with the burden of choice – and the ability to inform users when their hardware is no longer up to snuff.
The best idea, for those who are elligible, would be to sign up for the extra year of support and sit the current wave out as there will be bargains to be had next year.
* And I don't consider PCs to be any different to other company equipment, though company cars are probaby a far bigger waste of resources. If we're supposed to use it for longer, don't make it tax-deductible.
D-Day itself is actually mid-November when the next updates would normally have appeared
Unless there's a 0 day that would have had a patch delivered sooner.
I kind of hope a few bad guys have been holding onto a 0 day and waiting until Oct 15th to deploy it. Having millions of now "unsupported" home PC p0wned with Microsoft not willing to provide a fix unless you take additional steps to ingrain yourself in their ecosystem (i.e. enabling cloud backups) would create quite some public pressure for that date to be extended.
Microsoft doesn't care about public pressure and when was the last time they issued a 0-day fix for the unwashed masses? But they may respond to legal pressure. Even, then having seen the results of a 0-day exploit on a company Exchange server – sorry, Microsoft, did you offer to cover the costs incurred of a system shutdown, restore and check? No, I thought not. This kind of event should have been enough to convince companies to move their e-mail infrastructure away from MS Clusterfuck. But it didn't.
I think we already have the basis for court cases over "extended support" – the hoops you may have to jump through to qualify (like being in Europe) will be grist to the mills of any class action suit lawyers in California: Merkins are being discriminated against.
What I don't understand is the different treatment of home and business users.
A home user who has logged into a Microsoft Account gets free "Extended Security Updates". But a business user who is paying a higher fee for their office software does not get this free support. Why?
This is a little funny as I know some small businesses who cheat the system and use Home Editions of office software. They now get the free ESU, but businesses doing things by the book and paying the higher fees don't get this option.
I would assume that they are reckoning on most businesses having policies which require them to run supported versions of the software, so they see an opportunity to charge them for extended updates here. Home users are far less likely to pay extra even once it's out of support.
They have businesses over more of a barrel than home users. It is a lot easier for an individual home user to migrate off their one Windows 10 PC to Mac or Linux than for a whole business (which has a more complex environment and likely a lot of Windows only software) to do the same for all their Windows 10 PCs.
"... after which business customers will be forced to pay for extended security updates at $61 for the following 12 months. This doubles to $122 for year two and doubles again for year three."
Let me get this straight. Microsoft sells you a defective product then, after a while, charges you ever increasing fees to fix said product in order to induce you to buy another almost certainly defective product which will almost certainly eventually cost you more money to fix defects unless you buy yet another almost certainly defective product in a few years?
Great business plan there. Designed by the Mafia, the Medellin Cartel, or Donald Trump?
(And, parenthetically, there doesn't seem to be much incentive there for Microsoft to put much effort into shipping defect free products.)
«Let me get this straight. Microsoft sells you a defective product»
Yes, and incomplete to boot, Microsoft tells us so clearly, as they clearly state that the product will get "new features and general bug fixes (including security ones) for at least five years after release, and at leas 5 years of security fixes only after that". So that we can make an informed choice about getting it, or not. And if one buys the product 6 years after release, one still knows the support dates reffer to launch, not date of purchase, so one can make, again, an informed decition.,
«charges you ever increasing fees to fix said product» Those extra fees only kick in AFTER 10 years of varying levels of FREE support have been exhausted. And, for the fist time this year, normal consumers can get them too, along with enperprises.
«in order to induce you to buy another almost certainly defective product» If your machine Qualifies, the new defective product is free as in beer. The new defective product launched in Oct 2021. In august 2017, you could already buy machines that would comply with the HW requirements, and could upgrade to the new defective product for free as in beer.
And the thing is, this is standard practice in the Wider industry, and pre-dates Windows:
SunOS, Oracle, AiX, RedHat, SAP. Same scheme. ~ about a decade (give or take) from launch of free updates and security fixes + Expensive Paid security for many more moons.
Windows 11 is so FUCKING slow, FUCKING annoying and the usability is so FUCKING bad.
The few improvements below that FUCKED UP UI are overcompensated big big time by the FUCKING inefficiency the FUCKING UI pushes upon us.
And MS does not give a fuck about improving the speed.
I completely understand the frustration.
The only W11 computer I will likely ever buy new lasted until the end of its warranty period, upon which it was firmly punted off and replaced with Kubuntu 24.04.
At first I was curious to try out the new shiny but that lasted barely a few days before I started getting fed up with the crap start menu, immobile taskbar and notifications trying to sell me extra onedrive storage or other M$ crapware I don't need....
Microsoft ARE producing updates for Windows 10.
Firstly, for those who pay. Secondly, for EU users — because the EU complained.
Admittedly, it’s not really "free", because you still need a Microsoft account, and that comes with all the tracking that Microsoft builds in.
But here’s the thing: if they’re already producing updates, they’re already spending the time and money to do so. It wouldn’t cost them any more to just let every Windows 10 PC in the world get the updates. Except it would — not in production costs, but in lost sales. Those older computers wouldn’t be replaced by shiny new ones that:
1. insist on Microsoft accounts, and
2. come with shiny new Windows licences.
And their hardware partners wouldn’t get all the extra sales either. The fact that Microsoft are forcing most of the world to either stick with Windows 10 or upgrade means three things:
1. If people don’t upgrade and stick with Windows 10, then what happened to their “security above all else” pledge they were mumbling about the other day?
2. If people do upgrade, then millions of perfectly good computers go into landfill.
3. If people upgrade, Microsoft and their manufacturing partners make more money.
So what does that mean? It means Microsoft have deliberately implemented a policy that makes them more money, screws over PC owners, and creates more landfill in the process.
It is so fucking irresponsible and disingenuous! They are literally fucking up the environment so they can make more money. Don’t they have enough? Does corporate responsibility even exist anymore?
Not because the EU complained but because the EU has consumer protection legislation. So EU consumers - those using the Home editions - benefited because it was the law and the EU was big enough to be able to enforce that law. Given that the UK also has consumer protection law - it was some of that red tape theydidn't get round to burning - it applies in the UK as well. It won't apply in countries that don't have or can't be bothered enforcing such legislation and it won't apply to commercial versions because because commercial buyers are supposed to be knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions.
Is it just my customers (in Norfolk, UK) that are choosing to COMPLETELY ignore this for the most part? So many have said they're just going to wing it and replace as the hardware wears out.
I'm no fan of MS, and I know 11 only needs new hardware cos they say so, but even capable PCs aren't being upgraded.
Genuinely curious...
That's because people in Norfolk will ONLY buy something from QD, a boot sale or if it's an object that's been chained it to a bin outside a house with a bit of cardboard hung on it that has "£10" scrawled on it in permanent marker.
If you want to get up to £30, it really needs to be an old lawn mower.
I've taken the view that no more updates is what I'm after. Honestly, about the only thing I *might* need an update for is a network facing unauthenticated 0day in the kernel. But I do have a firewall, so not that scared about it either. And for the rest, patched or not, your just as vulnerable since nearly all attacks involve HUMAN BEINGS sitting at the keyboard clicking on things. Can't patch that.
I for one welcome the new more stable windows 10 without 'updates' to break shit constantly.
My shop decided to outsource a few months back, the inhouse had done all the W11 builds and testing, ready to roll and down came the axe. Now having to pay the outsourcer a nice chunk of change to do a completely new W11 build/test project. Also intereresting how there's been request to spend flipping great wadges of additional cash on new shiny laptops, all convenienntly purchased through the outsourcer too.
This W11 malarky is making some services companies a very nice tidy profit!
... here at Mangrove Manor, I have Windows 11 running on a circa 2018 MacBook (because I CAN, damnit!), indicating that it's perfectly capable of running on older hardware and that any additional hardware requirements are artificial. I liked Windows 10, but I don't have the hate boner for 11 that many people seem to. On the other hand, since Windows 11 is just 10 with a slightly different UI and new "features," Microsoft could have managed the "upgrade" process as a staged feature release or even as a set of optional features. I suspect that the major PC manufacturers took a look at the essential stability of the Windows 10 platform and thought, "Oh no, that won't do at all. There goes our gravy train." As a result, they leaned on Microsoft to force users to upgrade their PCs, and everyone is suffering as a result. From a revenue perspective, I can see no benefit to Microsoft, and they are taking a substantial reputational hit, so some other factor must be at work.
They're still adding enough updates to both win10 and win11 that break things. They deliberately only concentrate on massive enterprises. Small orgs can go to hell. Got an old printer that works perfectly fine? Fuck you... we're going to break scanning. FoR SeCuRiTy. That mantra cannot be used indefinitely. At some point we're going to realise what a rotten, rotten industry IT is.
Progress my arse.
"From a revenue perspective, I can see no benefit to Microsoft, and they are taking a substantial reputational hit, so some other factor must be at work."
Why can you see not revenue benefit to Microsoft? You're supposed to go out and buy new Windows 11 licences - that means revenue. They come attached to new hardware. MS might feel a small amount of loyalty to the H/W manufacturers because it was they who were the main selling agents for Windows over the years.
Of course if they just obsoleted W10 without an upgrade path they'd expect to face class actions. If they allow everyone to upgrade they miss the revenue. TPM 2 allows them a way out - they can provide upgrades to more recent purchases to fend off some of the potential class actions but limit the downside of that by pointing to "obsolete" H/W to defend against the rest.
But of course its about revenue - the licences and all the nasty upselling apportunities they can shoehorn into W11.
America's most persuasive Marxist, Richard D. Wolff, opines that businesses ought to be turned into workers' co-operatives.
The idea has merit so long as business is divided into two categories: entrepreneurial, almost by definition 'risk taking', and service. The former may create a need, and the latter fulfils a need. The latter justifiably may be taken into societal, or into worker, ownership/control.
Businesses breaking new ground start off as entrepreneurial. Their founders have a vision, immense self-confidence, and willingness to invest their own time to fulfil their ambitions. In addition, entrepreneurs usually have some direct financial 'skin in the game'; nevertheless, their commitment of time engenders potential personal 'opportunity cost': that arising should the venture fail, it being a consequence of time lost, time which profitably could have been spent doing something else.
Microsoft started life as entrepreneurial. It was driven by a handful of people whose initial vision was all-consuming. Microsoft entered virgin territory and soon gained the lion's share of obvious opportunities arising. Microsoft went from strength to strength and grew, in a remarkably short time, into a globally spanning leviathan. Inevitably, entropy diminished the founders' personal capacities for innovation. Day by day control of Microsoft, fell into the hands of business school graduates and accountants, people whose motivations and skills were not primarily directed towards solving software development conundra. Natural innovators became secondary to staid professional managers. That was a natural process common to all enterprise beyond a certain point; for example, in the fields of telephony, car manufacture, aircraft manufacture, pharmaceuticals, and finance. The 'routine', the tried and tested, and the not too commercially risky predominate.
Making widgets, e.g. nails, screws, motor car components, and printer ink, typifies the service component of business. 'Widgets' extend beyond essential physical artefacts to include the output of, banks, insurers, airlines, supermarket chains, and other service industries societally relied upon. These businesses do not depend upon a hot pace of innovation. Microsoft now stands truly in the category of simple service provider. Companies and individuals, but not I, rely upon continuity of supply. No longer do they require temptation for 'cutting edge' offered by a rapid output of upgrades. Yet, they are locked into whatever Microsoft deems best for them (i.e. best for itself). In the context of anachronistic law pertaining to so-called 'intellectual property', neither business nor individuals are able to resort to continuing Windows 10 support from alternative suppliers.
Microsoft is not alone in the category of service providers with long expired entrepreneurial impetus: providers contented by leeching-off complacency. Prime candidates for nationalisation or for conversion into workers' co-operatives include Microsoft, some related enterprises, and banking.
They just want you to be forced onto a platform that has even more tracking and data harvesting built in, that makes the user experience worse, that tries to force AI in your face for everything, that records your screen... and expects you to pay for the privilege and be thankful for it.
In short... FUCK OFF!!!
W10 works fine for me, I've not had a single nag to upgrade... either my X570 motherboard and 5800X3D CPU isn't compatible... or using OOSUS10 actually fucking works in shutting down their shit. I have no MS account and never will, I get no ads and hope I never do and I will burn this fucking thing to pieces before I ever allow an AI slop generator access to a single byte of information.
W10 will be my last MS OS, by the time I'll be forced of it by some dangerous flaw in the OS that it's too risky to use... I'll have moved to some variant of linux at last... I keep meaning to do it, I just need that last push and the willpower to learn something new... C'mon Proton... I still want to play my games.
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