8 ms·

What is Microsoft hoping to accomplish here? Given the rate of adoption of Windows 11, it seems unlikely that a majority of Windows 10 users will replace their

by ch_123 2y ago

What is Microsoft hoping to accomplish here? Given the rate of adoption of Windows 11, it seems unlikely that a majority of Windows 10 users will replace their hardware between now and October. It also seems to me that the scenario where a majority of PC users are running an unsupported Windows release is likely to create MS more problems than is offset by potential revenue from a hardware refresh cycle. Is there an ulterior motive at play beyond wanting to create a hardware refresh cycle?

Mindwipe 2y ago
It's pretty obviously two middle managers fighting each other, and senior management is too distracted by AI to worry about core products being on fire.
- saratogacx 2y ago
  Maybe if the renamed the bypass Microsoft Windows 11 Installer Co-Pilot for Legacy Systems it would get their attention.
  - thewebguyd 2y ago
    Then next year, Microsoft Windows 11 Installer Co-Pilot for Legacy Systems (new)
- grotorea 2y ago
  Is this not important enough for senior management?
xmodem 2y ago
I don't think there's anything going on here other than general corporate ham-fisted-ness. * Microsoft believes the improvements in windows 11 provide genuine benefit to their users. * Microsoft doesn't want to maintain their older OS forever. What we are seeing play out however is that the consumer / small business market either does not understand or does not care about those benefits. I don't see any viable end-state for this other than Microsoft relaxing the requirements for Windows 11 or extending the end-of-support date for Windows 10. Based on this action my money is on the latter.
- smw 2y ago
  Wouldn't disallowing updates to Win 11 be the opposite of a logical plan if your goal was to get people upgraded to Win 11?
  - butlike 2y ago
    "Well you see..." <starts waving hands around wildly> "If you debase your current OS, you PRIME people for the next OS, Win13!" <speech devolves into gibberish at this point>
  - hparadiz 2y ago
    The secondary goal is lowering support costs. Less hardware to support does that.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Substantially the entirety of the legacy hardware support cost is for accessories, i.e. PCIe cards and USB devices. All of that still exists and people will continue to expect to plug their existing devices into their new PC and have them work.
  - xmodem 2y ago
    Depends why you want to get users upgraded. If you want your users to be upgraded so they have access to security improvements, and those security improvements require TPM 2.0 or whatever, then allowing upgrades on older systems without TPM 2.0 rather undermines the point of getting those users upgraded.
hennell 2y ago
As an Occam fan, I'd assume the main accomplishment is ensuring a minimum level of hardware capability for Windows 11. Anything on W11 will have a TPM so you can build around it. There's also a minimum CPU spec or whatever you can know you don't need to test under. I'd imagine that cutting off support for 10+ year old machines and hardware would give a much bigger advantage then the revenue they get from a hardware refresh itself.
kjellsbells 2y ago
I would it is a combination of metric-stuffing, land grab, and genuine concern about security. Metric stuffing. Everyone at Microsoft is graded on "impact". All the EVP-types at Microsoft have their eye on boldface jobs, so they need a track record of massive impact. Beimg able to claim that they got W11 from X billion devices to Y is how theyll be judged. Another example is how in Azure, the only metric that matters is consumed revenue. That sort of thing drives behavior. Land grab. W11 infamously makes the Start menu a billboard and has all kinds of usage data going back to the mother ship. If adoption slows, then Microsoft misses out on eyeballs, misses out on the ability to weld users to Copilot, misses the opportunity to earn money from ads, misses the opportunity to improve Windows by learning how people really use their conputers. Security. Windows is embedded in modern life and although Microsoft gets a lot of flak, (and sometimes it takes a major beating to remind them of their responsibilities), they do want to elevate the security of users. They believe that W11 and TPM will give them a basis to really deliver stronger services. I dont know that they are right (eg if the #1 exposure for home users is ransomware, does a tpm help at all?), but I am prepared to give them dome grace. Then again, I plan to use this opportunity to install Linux on my old PC.
- Hawxy 2y ago
  > Security There's a pretty interesting video from 2023 that goes through much of Microsoft's thoughts around Windows security. It flew under the radar unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6ClX-y2AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6ClX-y2AE
  - jpm_sd 2y ago
    Do you have a TL;DW? It's an hour long video
    - Hawxy 2y ago
      - Windows 11 has provided a hardware security baseline for Microsoft, with features that require hardware support (HVCI, TPM etc) to be enabled by default going forward, stating that Windows 10 strategy of off-by-default was a failure. - Admin accounts are a continued security problem within the Windows ecosystem, so a future version of Windows will be adding a new "Adminless" account model with linux-like just-in-time escalation. This new model intends to provide a secure middle-ground between the frustrations of a standard user account and the security risks of an Admin account. "Adminless" accounts will run as a "less privileged" user by default and prompt users with Windows Hello when an application requires escalation for a given operation, rather than permanently running the account as a standard or admin user. - Win32 Applications will be bundled under the new Win32 App Isolation model, which provides the security benefits of UWP sandboxing & clean uninstalls without the API limitations of UWP. Developers will be able to specify what privileges an application requires, much like other application platforms. A demo was shown of Notepad++ running under this sandbox model with minimal modification. -TPMs within the ecosystem are not in a healthy state, with telemetry telling Microsoft that many are running vulnerable firmware due to manufactures not pushing out updates, and some being inoperable due to hardware failures or other issues. Microsoft is working on its Pluton security chip to replace/augment the existing TPM ecosystem and have the ability to push out firmware updates via Windows Update. - Software/Hardware mitigations are reaching the end of the road in terms of viability. Microsoft is now focused on eliminating classes of security bugs with extensive R&D going into the use of Memory-safe languages (Rust) in areas of the system that exploits often appear in.
Avamander 2y ago
What you've said does seem plausible. But on the other hand there are valid reasons for requiring a minimum baseline for Windows 11. The TPM requirements for example allow seamless BitLocker (which provides feature-parity with macOS), it allows secure system credential storage (in both consumer and enterprise contexts) and it's also useful for application developers. For example Chrome can defend user data better against malware or provide features like Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC). Requiring certain CPU features on the other hand makes it easier to ship better-optimized executables. The two combined make it possible to provide things like VBS/HVCI, which is a massive leap for Windows security (it's actually considered a security boundary, unlike UAC).
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Allowing old devices without those TPM requirements to work would not limit security of the devices that can work with it. Sooner or later, these non windows 11 compliant machines will mostly disappear from most households and offices and will only attract retro computing and linux users when they will not match the usual memory requirements of the day. These are usually the kind of computers that came with 8GB or less of memory out of the box and they could quietly drop support for them somewhere later within the next 10 years when everybody is running 128GB of ram or so and only a handful of people care about it.
  - Avamander 2y ago
    I'm fairly sure that you'll be able to run W11 without a TPM for a relatively long time, it's just not supported. It's a risk you have to take, it's a requirement for OEMs not to shaft you with the hardware they sell. If anything it's the CPU requirements that create a hard requirement for newer HW. But in that case, that support is a cost for them. Why should they spend the effort for what is likely going to be a very subpar experience?
- lukeschlather 2y ago
  The number of functioning computers that are restricted to Windows 10 probably still outnumber the number of computers that can run Windows 11. Most people don't have $500 to drop on a replacement. (Very many of these computers might've been thousands of dollars new and will still outperform the majority of new Windows 11 machines.) Microsoft is just putting a huge environmental waste of a mandated obsolesence tax on the entire world. But Microsoft doesn't pay the opportunity cost of losing all that hardware. (I wonder how much the hardware Microsoft wants destroyed is worth, hundreds of millions of dollars?)
somenameforme 2y ago
Be thankful you've never found yourself involved in the Microsoft system of APIs. They behave beyond irrationally. Perhaps somebody can explain why from an internal view, but from an external view it's like this - WPF was one of Microsoft's first UI frameworks released after the Winforms age. It was initially Windows only but had a large enough following that it eventually ended up getting non-official ports to just about every platform. And it was really quite an excellent UI library. So then Microsoft decided to follow this up with UWP. UWP was the intended successor to WPF, the 'Universal Windows Platform'. It was supposed to run on any Windows platform. But then the Windows Phone got cancelled, and they also eventually cancelled all support for anything except Windows 10. So it turned into the Windows 10 Platform. And it was heavily tied into the Microsoft store to the point that actually deploying it elsewhere was rendered infeasible. Outside of that it was a technically inferior WPF with a few nicer looking default UI elements and a bunch of new bugs. Oh and some namespaces and other things were changed mostly pretty randomly just enough to make it completely incompatible with WPF. And then this process repeated multiple times over. Each time they lost more and more developers. If they had simply continued building on WPF I think they would likely be a universal standard for UI development, at least for desktop. Instead they're now onto WinUI 3 which nobody uses, including Microsoft. Oh and all the while this was happening they were also developing Xamarin (and similar timeline of a million subsequent renamings and 'refactorings') which is pretty much the same thing, but different, and cross platform, but not. I'm the sort that'd naturally leap to conspiratorial explanations - Microsoft pushing anything called "trusted" feels like a rusted van with darkened windows sitting outside a school with "FREE CANDY" sloppily painted on the side. But in this case.. no, Microsoft is just so completely weird and irrational with how they push things, often to the point of self defeat.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  all of Microsoft's UI is like this and I really don't get it. Forms, WPF, and UWP were all abandoned at different stages of development. Microsoft ships a UWP demo repository which includes the most fully functional Bluetooth manager anyone has ever built for W10. The stock Bluetooth manager has maybe 10% of the functionality. It's also fundamentally broken in a lot of ways. But this UWP demo they have should have been the stock app. It's wild. Then of course you still have 50 year old UIs hiding in the lowest levels of the control panel. You can dig through the archeological record on your own pc and look at Win3 UI designs. It's astonishing. At this point, I don't know anyone who uses any of Microsoft's UI frameworks for a real product. It's either QT or Avalonia or something. Who would ever trust their newest framework when every prior framework was abandoned half-finished and left to rot for years?
butlike 2y ago
Why not release a tool that runs and shows me the minimum I need to spend to get my PC windows 11 ready? Hide it behind a few menus/drop downs since it will be an "advanced" pc-builder tool. I imagine it's only my MOBO which is missing TPM, but a suggestion of what mobo to buy which would be compatible with all my other components (RAM DIMMS, PCI-e cards) would be killer.
- johngossman 2y ago
  PC Health check will tell you if your existing PC will run Win11. If you are building a computer, any new MOBO has TPM.
asveikau 2y ago
If you think of how much hardware is capable to run it but they're artificially blocking, it's also rather morally irresponsible from the perspective of e-waste.
66fm472tjy7 2y ago
puts tinfoil hat on Ensuring that a critical mass of people use remote attestation[0] capable devices. The next step is a browser API[1] for this so that content owners can exclude devices capable of storing the content, or stripping out ads/tracking, etc. Sure, there will be a cat-and-mouse game where people will figure out how to fake the attestation for some period of time, but general computation[2] is probably on the way out. ---- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trusted_Computing&oldid=1270660346#Remote_attestation https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trusted_Computing... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

by ch_123 2y ago

Mindwipe 2y ago

It's pretty obviously two middle managers fighting each other, and senior management is too distracted by AI to worry about core products being on fire.

saratogacx 2y ago
Maybe if the renamed the bypass Microsoft Windows 11 Installer Co-Pilot for Legacy Systems it would get their attention.
- thewebguyd 2y ago
  Then next year, Microsoft Windows 11 Installer Co-Pilot for Legacy Systems (new)
grotorea 2y ago
Is this not important enough for senior management?

xmodem 2y ago

I don't think there's anything going on here other than general corporate ham-fisted-ness. * Microsoft believes the improvements in windows 11 provide genuine benefit to their users. * Microsoft doesn't want to maintain their older OS forever. What we are seeing play out however is that the consumer / small business market either does not understand or does not care about those benefits. I don't see any viable end-state for this other than Microsoft relaxing the requirements for Windows 11 or extending the end-of-support date for Windows 10. Based on this action my money is on the latter.

smw 2y ago
Wouldn't disallowing updates to Win 11 be the opposite of a logical plan if your goal was to get people upgraded to Win 11?
- butlike 2y ago
  "Well you see..." <starts waving hands around wildly> "If you debase your current OS, you PRIME people for the next OS, Win13!" <speech devolves into gibberish at this point>
- hparadiz 2y ago
  The secondary goal is lowering support costs. Less hardware to support does that.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Substantially the entirety of the legacy hardware support cost is for accessories, i.e. PCIe cards and USB devices. All of that still exists and people will continue to expect to plug their existing devices into their new PC and have them work.
- xmodem 2y ago
  Depends why you want to get users upgraded. If you want your users to be upgraded so they have access to security improvements, and those security improvements require TPM 2.0 or whatever, then allowing upgrades on older systems without TPM 2.0 rather undermines the point of getting those users upgraded.

hennell 2y ago

As an Occam fan, I'd assume the main accomplishment is ensuring a minimum level of hardware capability for Windows 11. Anything on W11 will have a TPM so you can build around it. There's also a minimum CPU spec or whatever you can know you don't need to test under. I'd imagine that cutting off support for 10+ year old machines and hardware would give a much bigger advantage then the revenue they get from a hardware refresh itself.

kjellsbells 2y ago

I would it is a combination of metric-stuffing, land grab, and genuine concern about security. Metric stuffing. Everyone at Microsoft is graded on "impact". All the EVP-types at Microsoft have their eye on boldface jobs, so they need a track record of massive impact. Beimg able to claim that they got W11 from X billion devices to Y is how theyll be judged. Another example is how in Azure, the only metric that matters is consumed revenue. That sort of thing drives behavior. Land grab. W11 infamously makes the Start menu a billboard and has all kinds of usage data going back to the mother ship. If adoption slows, then Microsoft misses out on eyeballs, misses out on the ability to weld users to Copilot, misses the opportunity to earn money from ads, misses the opportunity to improve Windows by learning how people really use their conputers. Security. Windows is embedded in modern life and although Microsoft gets a lot of flak, (and sometimes it takes a major beating to remind them of their responsibilities), they do want to elevate the security of users. They believe that W11 and TPM will give them a basis to really deliver stronger services. I dont know that they are right (eg if the #1 exposure for home users is ransomware, does a tpm help at all?), but I am prepared to give them dome grace. Then again, I plan to use this opportunity to install Linux on my old PC.

Hawxy 2y ago
> Security There's a pretty interesting video from 2023 that goes through much of Microsoft's thoughts around Windows security. It flew under the radar unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6ClX-y2AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6ClX-y2AE
- jpm_sd 2y ago
  Do you have a TL;DW? It's an hour long video
  - Hawxy 2y ago
    - Windows 11 has provided a hardware security baseline for Microsoft, with features that require hardware support (HVCI, TPM etc) to be enabled by default going forward, stating that Windows 10 strategy of off-by-default was a failure. - Admin accounts are a continued security problem within the Windows ecosystem, so a future version of Windows will be adding a new "Adminless" account model with linux-like just-in-time escalation. This new model intends to provide a secure middle-ground between the frustrations of a standard user account and the security risks of an Admin account. "Adminless" accounts will run as a "less privileged" user by default and prompt users with Windows Hello when an application requires escalation for a given operation, rather than permanently running the account as a standard or admin user. - Win32 Applications will be bundled under the new Win32 App Isolation model, which provides the security benefits of UWP sandboxing & clean uninstalls without the API limitations of UWP. Developers will be able to specify what privileges an application requires, much like other application platforms. A demo was shown of Notepad++ running under this sandbox model with minimal modification. -TPMs within the ecosystem are not in a healthy state, with telemetry telling Microsoft that many are running vulnerable firmware due to manufactures not pushing out updates, and some being inoperable due to hardware failures or other issues. Microsoft is working on its Pluton security chip to replace/augment the existing TPM ecosystem and have the ability to push out firmware updates via Windows Update. - Software/Hardware mitigations are reaching the end of the road in terms of viability. Microsoft is now focused on eliminating classes of security bugs with extensive R&D going into the use of Memory-safe languages (Rust) in areas of the system that exploits often appear in.

Avamander 2y ago

What you've said does seem plausible. But on the other hand there are valid reasons for requiring a minimum baseline for Windows 11. The TPM requirements for example allow seamless BitLocker (which provides feature-parity with macOS), it allows secure system credential storage (in both consumer and enterprise contexts) and it's also useful for application developers. For example Chrome can defend user data better against malware or provide features like Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC). Requiring certain CPU features on the other hand makes it easier to ship better-optimized executables. The two combined make it possible to provide things like VBS/HVCI, which is a massive leap for Windows security (it's actually considered a security boundary, unlike UAC).

prmoustache 2y ago
Allowing old devices without those TPM requirements to work would not limit security of the devices that can work with it. Sooner or later, these non windows 11 compliant machines will mostly disappear from most households and offices and will only attract retro computing and linux users when they will not match the usual memory requirements of the day. These are usually the kind of computers that came with 8GB or less of memory out of the box and they could quietly drop support for them somewhere later within the next 10 years when everybody is running 128GB of ram or so and only a handful of people care about it.
- Avamander 2y ago
  I'm fairly sure that you'll be able to run W11 without a TPM for a relatively long time, it's just not supported. It's a risk you have to take, it's a requirement for OEMs not to shaft you with the hardware they sell. If anything it's the CPU requirements that create a hard requirement for newer HW. But in that case, that support is a cost for them. Why should they spend the effort for what is likely going to be a very subpar experience?
lukeschlather 2y ago
The number of functioning computers that are restricted to Windows 10 probably still outnumber the number of computers that can run Windows 11. Most people don't have $500 to drop on a replacement. (Very many of these computers might've been thousands of dollars new and will still outperform the majority of new Windows 11 machines.) Microsoft is just putting a huge environmental waste of a mandated obsolesence tax on the entire world. But Microsoft doesn't pay the opportunity cost of losing all that hardware. (I wonder how much the hardware Microsoft wants destroyed is worth, hundreds of millions of dollars?)

somenameforme 2y ago

Be thankful you've never found yourself involved in the Microsoft system of APIs. They behave beyond irrationally. Perhaps somebody can explain why from an internal view, but from an external view it's like this - WPF was one of Microsoft's first UI frameworks released after the Winforms age. It was initially Windows only but had a large enough following that it eventually ended up getting non-official ports to just about every platform. And it was really quite an excellent UI library. So then Microsoft decided to follow this up with UWP. UWP was the intended successor to WPF, the 'Universal Windows Platform'. It was supposed to run on any Windows platform. But then the Windows Phone got cancelled, and they also eventually cancelled all support for anything except Windows 10. So it turned into the Windows 10 Platform. And it was heavily tied into the Microsoft store to the point that actually deploying it elsewhere was rendered infeasible. Outside of that it was a technically inferior WPF with a few nicer looking default UI elements and a bunch of new bugs. Oh and some namespaces and other things were changed mostly pretty randomly just enough to make it completely incompatible with WPF. And then this process repeated multiple times over. Each time they lost more and more developers. If they had simply continued building on WPF I think they would likely be a universal standard for UI development, at least for desktop. Instead they're now onto WinUI 3 which nobody uses, including Microsoft. Oh and all the while this was happening they were also developing Xamarin (and similar timeline of a million subsequent renamings and 'refactorings') which is pretty much the same thing, but different, and cross platform, but not. I'm the sort that'd naturally leap to conspiratorial explanations - Microsoft pushing anything called "trusted" feels like a rusted van with darkened windows sitting outside a school with "FREE CANDY" sloppily painted on the side. But in this case.. no, Microsoft is just so completely weird and irrational with how they push things, often to the point of self defeat.

mystified5016 2y ago
all of Microsoft's UI is like this and I really don't get it. Forms, WPF, and UWP were all abandoned at different stages of development. Microsoft ships a UWP demo repository which includes the most fully functional Bluetooth manager anyone has ever built for W10. The stock Bluetooth manager has maybe 10% of the functionality. It's also fundamentally broken in a lot of ways. But this UWP demo they have should have been the stock app. It's wild. Then of course you still have 50 year old UIs hiding in the lowest levels of the control panel. You can dig through the archeological record on your own pc and look at Win3 UI designs. It's astonishing. At this point, I don't know anyone who uses any of Microsoft's UI frameworks for a real product. It's either QT or Avalonia or something. Who would ever trust their newest framework when every prior framework was abandoned half-finished and left to rot for years?

butlike 2y ago

Why not release a tool that runs and shows me the minimum I need to spend to get my PC windows 11 ready? Hide it behind a few menus/drop downs since it will be an "advanced" pc-builder tool. I imagine it's only my MOBO which is missing TPM, but a suggestion of what mobo to buy which would be compatible with all my other components (RAM DIMMS, PCI-e cards) would be killer.

johngossman 2y ago
PC Health check will tell you if your existing PC will run Win11. If you are building a computer, any new MOBO has TPM.

asveikau 2y ago

If you think of how much hardware is capable to run it but they're artificially blocking, it's also rather morally irresponsible from the perspective of e-waste.

66fm472tjy7 2y ago

puts tinfoil hat on Ensuring that a critical mass of people use remote attestation[0] capable devices. The next step is a browser API[1] for this so that content owners can exclude devices capable of storing the content, or stripping out ads/tracking, etc. Sure, there will be a cat-and-mouse game where people will figure out how to fake the attestation for some period of time, but general computation[2] is probably on the way out. ---- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trusted_Computing&oldid=1270660346#Remote_attestation https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trusted_Computing... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36817305 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg