Microsoft has already decided Windows 10’s fate and we’ve extensively covered its developments over the last twelve months. We’re nine months away from the EOS date for the OS and a new Microsoft report reveals how optimistic the company is about this decision.
As spotted by Windows Latest, citing an IDC report published in 2024, Microsoft expects 80% of business users to switch to Windows 11. It also anticipates that 70% of consumer edition users will move to Windows 11 in the next two years.
If you ask us, that’s a pretty hopeful number considering the millions of users that are already on Windows 10. Microsoft’s assumption that people will eventually move to Windows 11 is not wrong, but the numbers it expects are way more exaggerated than they should be.
A few days back, we published a post citing an Eset report about how 32 million PCs in Germany are still on Windows 10. Going by these numbers the actual global Windows 10 user base could be in the hundreds of millions, and that’s not a small number by any means.
To expect that these many users, many of which have capable PC to run the new OS but cannot due to missing TPM and other requirements, will migrate to new PCs in the next nine months is a bit too optimistic.
Microsoft thinks highly of the new AI PCs, aka Copilot+, which by its logic are enough to excite everyone to buy a new computer. They can help you remember things, generate images for you, and do other AI tasks in some special apps. But are these features something that the current population cannot live without? Certainly not.
A change in question
The whole idea of AI PC’s and local task processing is to make the already heavy investment on Copilot seem logical. We do not abhor any such advancements in technology, this is a technology blog, after all. However, it appears that Microsoft is under the wrong impression of the likeability of these PC’s.
Why would someone who is already stuck on an old or perfectly usable Windows 10 PC go and shell out $1000 on a new AI PC? Even if they were to upgrade to Windows 11, entry level processor equipped PCs with an Intel i5 12-gen or similar Ryzen counterpart are much cheaper.
Similarly, expecting 80% of companies to purchase these high-priced AI PCs for menial office tasks like running MS and other apps seems like a no-brainer. Most AI tasks, like text and image-related ones, are doable via web requests and even integrated into the Microsoft 365 Enterprise app.
Why would businesses go to such extreme lengths just to introduce such features that serve little use in their daily operations? Even the enterprise extended update program can extend these soon-to-be-obsolete PCs’ lifeline by a couple more years.
Windows Latest understands that the transition will happen but at a slower rate for business users who can invest in the update program instead of buying a new PC.
For consumer editions there are many options like switching to Linux, using Windows 11 by bypassing hardware/security requirements, or using a third-party service that guarantees security updates for the future.
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