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.
So they see an opportunity to sell more shit at the expense of the environment.
Nice. Capitalism at is finest.
Microsoft could not care less about home users.
The key word there is “enterprise enviroments”, who thanks to a pile of new regulations, will be forced to upgrade for the sake of it.
It’s a case of creating the demand for their own product, all concert: investment funds (like Blackrock), with a stake both at MS and hardware vendors like Dell, lobbies governments to create laws and regulations about “cyber security” with step fines for those non-compliant, and also forces the whole supply chain of their companies to stay “compliant”.
Then, you cease supporting some “legacy” stuff that everyone is perfectly content to use, and PROFIT!
Just like magic.
Want to know the real problem here? Corporations learning they don’t need end consumers. They can just consume amongst themselves in circular fashion eternally and be gone with it, creating their own demand, investing amongst themselves, purchasing their own services and products, goes on.
kwanbis,
There are so many ways in which our planet mirrors the tragedy of the commons.
Obviously microsoft are the assholes here, but frankly what they are doing is effectively the norm now. Executives don’t care about any of it, only their own pocketbooks. Without regulation, there’s no incentive to do anything about it. CEOs are more than happy to externalize the harms caused by their own activities. Every one of us knows this to be the case and yet for a multitude of reasons we’ve been collectively unwilling/unable to fix it. We bare these burdens so that corporate profits can keep going higher. To be fair there are advocates for right to repair/pollution reduction/etc, but they’re fighting an uphill battles against such powerful corporations and lobbyists. Making any progress through government is rare and the political pendulums can feel like a one step forward, two steps back situations.
Even in areas where green investments could actually produce positive economic activity, they still kill these initiatives anyway. We had great opportunities to invest and grow domestic solar panel manufacturing and become leaders in the world, but instead now most panels have to be imported from china. It didn’t have to be this way except western MBAs were more focused on rent seeking business models instead of actually doing the hard work of building stuff. This is old news with hardware, but the same problems are leaking into the software side too. Not only are these capitalists failing us, but because of them our domestic industries keep falling further behind. Despite all the wealth and resources they’re sitting on, they may be dooming us to an eventual collapse as their failure to invest in western production and skills results in a bad feedback loop.
I was going to write about “big mega corp one again shafting users”, but then EU government body managed to pull the worst anti-consumer move of all time, eclipsing any harm any private company can do to EU citizens.
(No, I don’t mean what Microsoft did is benign, it was bad. But at least you have a choice)
What happened?
They banned end-to-end encryption for the public.
So much so, some actors have already moved forward with draconian rules:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115584160910016309
Icing on the cake?
Of course government officials are exempt from “clear text only communications that will be collected by cheapest vendor who won the contract bid”
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/chat-control-eu-lawmakers-finally-agree-on-the-voluntary-scanning-of-your-private-chats
They of course use one of their most valuable excuses to steal more of public freedoms.
@Thom: Please write an article about “chat control” . This needs much more public attention.
Chat control is barely a blip on the radar at the moment, if you understand how the EU legislative process works. The endless fearmongering is happening way too early in the process, and that’s doing nothing but make people tired of it before any real impact on the process can be made.
Chat control will be covered here once it actually poses a real threat of turning into any law whatsoever. Right now it just does not.
Thom,
Thank for the quick response, I appreciate it.
To be honest, I’m not privy to all the details of EU mechanisms. However from this side of the pond it is all too scary. Not only I’m worried about the fragmentation (again GrapheneOS is just the first victim among many), I’m more afraid if there won’t be fragmentation.
We already have our crazies on this side. But they usually “take a hint” and don’t pass these things. However if it becomes a norm in the second largest market, they could easily “influence” big tech to fall in line (and you’d probably have seen how quickly they would fall in line to continue doing business)
Which would practically mean the end of private Internet for all of us (or at least criminalization of it)
And… again to be fair, I checked again.
The language has changed from mandatory scanning to Voluntary one — for those that are deemed “high risk”.
But do you think that won’t be forced onto companies to “willingly volunteer” opening up backdoors?
(missed edit)
For our “crazies”, we have three “undead” bills which has been struct down many times, but the congress keep bringing them back: STOP CSAM, EARN IT (anti section 230), and KOSA.
All of them are more or less similarly dangerous for the public freedoms.