The Truth of Windows 11

With Microsoft having now announced the imminent release of Windows 11, despite having declared Windows 10, the 'last version' of Windows - it's fair for us to be asking in IT 'What the hell is going on!'.

Of course - people have misunderstood what the phrase 'the last version' of Windows meant! There were initial cheers initially from the Linux, Google and Mac camps - as if Microsoft had thrown in towel, but of course Microsoft didn't mean the 'last version'... they meant that Windows was no longer a product, it was a service.

This move has been hugely beneficial to Microsoft. Not because it's increased any revenue directly, but because it has saved Windows from that perception, that it was an insecure, bug riddled mess. Gone are the days, when a PC needed to be rebuilt every 6 months just to stop it grinding to a halt, gone are the too familiar blue screens of death - and incompatibility errors are now largely a thing of the past; this is all largely thanks to the Windows as a service model.

Operating Windows as a service, with solid updates - and driving these updates into the market, to be adopted by the billions of devices out there - has allowed application and driver developers to massively improve their products. They no longer need to test their application across several versions of Windows, across dozen of patch levels - and when a new Windows version is released, hold back until a sufficient number of their customers have moved, before finally following them onto the new platform to discover and fix the bugs. Instead we have everyone in lock step together. One version of Windows needs to be compatible with your product, the latest version.

Hence Windows now enjoys reliability and security which used to be the sole domain of the Apple Mac user, and with Microsoft spending a billion a year on security improvements - this continues.

So if that is all going so well - Why would Microsoft reverse tack, and announce a Windows 11.

Well that's because it's Windows 11 in name only.

While there are some user interface changes, a new sounds, and a different background - the truth is, that all existing applications, all existing drivers - everything you do on Windows 10 - will also work on Windows 11. There is nothing in Windows 11 - that Microsoft couldn't apply to Windows 10.

So what's the point.

Well the significant bit - is what Microsoft are dropping support for.

Windows 10 has been extremely generous in providing free 6 monthly updates, to PCs which can be ten years old. Many of those PCs are running faster today, than the day they were purchased because of the continual operating system enhancements. But supporting ten year old systems, means Microsoft have been hampered by some of the improvements they would like to make but can't.

So Microsoft would have a choice. They could spin out a negative message, which would read:

Windows 10 drops support for DirectX 11, screen resolutions lower than 720p, PCs that dont have TPM encryption chips, disk drives partitioned with old style master boot records, machines with only 2GB of memory, old style BIOS - meaning that hundreds of thousands of machines will no longer be supported for Windows 10 upgrades.

Or

It can make some bold user interface changes (which were in the pipeline anyway). Bolt Microsoft Teams into the operating system, make the above list the minimum system requirement - and call it Windows 11.

The reality is that Windows 11, is Windows 10 with a new minimum specification. It's an overdue resetting of a baseline, which means Microsoft can push an industry into more quickly adopting some of these modernish features - and means Microsoft haven't got to make things work on an 800x600 screen resolution any more, or try to make Windows usable on 1GB of memory.

There's nothing wrong with that - but that's the reality.

It's unfortunate that we live in a world of hype IT stories, and fanboys - where an organization cant simply say something like - 'look we've supported the PC you purchased ten years ago, for all this time at no charge - can you PLEASE get more memory, and a security chip now for our next update - oh and we're sticking Teams in the next update as well". The press would be far less forgiving than the current curiosity about the NEW version of Windows, which really only exists in the minds of the Microsoft marketing department.