Windows 10 will now require up-to-date hardware

Just in case you thought Microsoft's "Clover Trail" Atom debacle was some kind of aberration, Microsoft have now made it official: if they don't feel your hardware, you won't get any more Windows 10 updates. Period.

From Gordon Kelly at Forbes:

Right now Windows 10 is undergoing a massive upgrade to the so-called ‘Creators Update’. But suddenly Microsoft has confirmed millions of Windows 10 users will never get it…

Speaking to PC World, Microsoft said that despite pledging Windows 10 feature updates until October 13th 2020, this will now depend on users running relatively modern hardware. In short: if a manufacturer stops supporting your hardware at any point then Microsoft may not longer upgrade your version of Windows 10.

“Recognizing that a combination of hardware, driver and firmware support is required to have a good Windows 10 experience, we updated our support lifecycle policy to align with the hardware support period for a given device,” Microsoft said in a statement.

“If a hardware partner stops supporting a given device or one of its key components and stops providing driver updates, firmware updates, or fixes, it may mean that device will not be able to properly run a future Windows 10 feature update.”

And the result of a device or component no longer being supported is severe. When updating users will simply receive the message: “Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC”.

And to make matters worse, at present Windows 10 will not tell users which piece of hardware is responsible for the cancellation. A user will have to check every part of their PC, from the processor and RAM to the hard drive, graphics and network card.

This brutal (and frankly over generalised) decision follows in the wake of Microsoft blocking Windows 10 Creators Update upgrades for computers using older Intel Atom ‘Clover Trail’ processors without warning or explanation. Conversely it also said new Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Ryzen silicon will also be made incompatible with older versions of Windows to force them onto Windows 10.

Brutal snobbery: confirmed.

Once again, Darth Microsoft is altering the deal, making Windows 10 look like an ever-less-attractive option for organizations (and individuals) who may not want to be forced to upgrade all of their hardware in order to switch to an operating system that they're not what wild about, to start with. Still, even with the banality-of-evil tone of this new announcement, something feels slightly different about this latest broken promise by the Redmond crew. Given how horrible the optics of this are, and how self-destructive this move should be to Microsoft's attempts to woo enterprise customers over to Windows 10, I have to think that this is almost entirely a cost-cutting measure.

After laying off unknown thousands of their staff, Microsoft are clearly not done cutting costs in their stagnant Windows 10 operations, as they shift focus to the Azure and other cloud services. Supporting the entire range of Windows-capable hardware wasn't luring users over to the new OS, so it makes a brutal sort of sense to stop doing that, awful PR be damned. It's possible that this was always the plan, that Microsoft never planned to continue supporting older hardware in spite of promising to do so, but it doesn't feel like that to me; it feels like Microsoft's ongoing failure to lure customers to Windows 10 is starting to stress their organization and operations, more broadly. The cracks have been slow to show, but this might be the cracks starting to show, no matter what their share price is doing on any given day.

Of course, it's entirely possible that this is wishful thinking on my part. I've long wanted for Microsoft to show some sign of feeling some sort of adverse effects from their own bad behaviour; to show some sort of sign that bullshit wasn't always going to be rewarded; to show some sort of sign that they recognized the need to change what they were doing, in response to the clear evidence that their current strategy wasn't working. And it looks like they are doing all of those things, shifting their focus away from being all things to all users all the time, to being the supplier of services only to those users with "deep enough" pockets, provided those users were willing to pay the premium needed to keep playing with Microsoft's toys.

I'm somewhat surprised that their shift of focus is not away from the bullshit, but rather deeper into it, but we are talking about a major multinational corporation that's used to operating more-or-less with impunity, so I really shouldn't have been. Be careful what you wish for, friends; remember that more bullshit is always an option. Apart from an increase in the reek and volume of Microsoft's fecal output, though, what could this shift in their stated policy (and messaging) mean for Windows 10's adoption rate, and the state of the OS market more broadly?

In the short term, I'm afraid, it probably won't mean much. People who have already switched to Windows 10 will probably stay with it, if for no other reason than a lack other options, but people who hadn't already switched now have one more reason to stay away, as a result, I expect that Windows 10's adoption rate will remain stagnant when the numbers are released in a few days, and that they will stay stagnant in the months to come.

In the longer term, however, this move by Microsoft could end up costing them significantly. Users faced with the need to replace perfectly functional hardware for no other reason than that Microsoft won't support it anymore could decide to switch to some other operating system instead; Linux, for example, doesn't care what kind of hardware you're running, and is also free. And it's not like newer hardware is significantly better than the hardware of five years ago; Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore, so the fact that Microsoft has suddenly decided to force users to buy new PCs that they don't actually need isn't necessarily going to work. Corporations and publicly-funded institutions, in particular, might decide to opt for adopting Linux and keeping their existing hardware, rather than Windows 10's twice-a-year major update cycle and the cost of replacing all of their PCs, not just now but on an ongoing basis for the lifetime of the OS. Both options will have associated costs, but I can't help but think that the one involving free software and no new hardware might just cost less.

I don't expect to see any increase in Windows 10 adoption rates, or PC sales figures, for the rest of this year. Windows 10 is thoroughly stagnant, and PC sales have been heading in the opposite direction for years (Moore's Law not being a thing anymore), so Microsoft revealing their inner asshat to the world just isn't news enough to shift either trend. Look for PC sales to continue declining, and Windows 10 adoption rate to remain stuck at 26% or so, for the foreseeable future.