Unsurprisingly, with little more than a year to run before Windows 10’s unpopular end-of-life becomes reality, speculation continues to mount as to whether Microsoft will relent and extend support or remove the hardware hurdles preventing millions from upgrading. But here’s the bad news if you have such hopes—Microsoft has just issued a little-noticed, dressed-up warning for the 70% yet to upgrade.
This comes by way of an innocuous post from Microsoft’s Digital Inside Track blog, “which tells the story of how Microsoft uses its own technology.” This particular post trumpets Microsoft’s own upgrade to Windows 11, which “makes secure-by-default viable thanks to a combination of modern hardware and software. This ready out-of-the-box protection enables us to create a new baseline internally across Microsoft, one that level sets our enterprise to be more secure for a hybrid workplace.”
The post was published just ahead of the most recent Patch Tuesday—which revealed yet more zero-days for Windows users to contend with, and includes a timely comment from David Weston, the company’s vice president of Enterprise and OS Security: “We’ve made significant strides to create chip-to-cloud Zero Trust out of the box. Windows 11 is redesigned for hybrid work and security with built-in hardware-based isolation, proven encryption, and our strongest protection against malware.”
If there was any doubt that this is an unapologetic trumpeting of the new hardware hurdle, the post’s headline alone should be confirmation enough: “Hardware-backed Windows 11 empowers Microsoft with secure-by-default baseline,” with the article reinforcing that “this new baseline for protection is one of several reasons Microsoft upgraded to Windows 11… The new hardware-backed security features create the foundation for new protections. This empowers us to not only protect our enterprise but also our customers.” Putting aside the non-starter of Microsoft not upgrading.
The hardware hurdle is TPM—the PC’s Trusted Platform Module, of course, with Windows 11 mandating TPM 2.0, “a critical building block for protecting user identities and data,” Weston says. “For many enterprises, including Microsoft, TPM facilitates Zero Trust security by measuring the health of a device using hardware that is resilient to tampering common with software-only solutions.”
And then the final clincher. “The hardware-backed features of Windows 11 create additional interference against malware, ransomware, and more sophisticated hardware-based attacks… By enforcing a hardware requirement, we can now do more than ever to keep our users, products, and customers safe.”
This is all another way of saying that with Windows 10 you get the opposite. Less secure from all those threats. And in the current environment, Microsoft’s warning is one you simply cannot ignore. Bottom line—when it comes to security, Windows 11 is a software and hardware proposition, and letting hundreds of millions of users off the hardware hook, treating it as software only, would undermine that.
The post was published just a few weeks after Microsoft shut down the well-publicized “/product server” workaround, which I commented at the time was a clear signal that hurdles were not about to be relaxed. And while the internet has been abuzz in recent weeks with articles on the workarounds that remain, one can infer that other popular but unofficial workarounds may be shut down as well.
All of which highlights the real challenge for the 70% of Windows users yet to make the leap to Windows 11—replacing expensive hardware with no secondary market to push old hardware into. Canalys calculates that this hyper-scale refresh would result in “roughly a fifth of devices becoming e-waste due to incompatibility with the Windows 11 OS. This equates to 240 million PCs. If these were all folded laptops, stacked one on top of another, they would make a pile 600km taller than the moon.”
“With Windows 11,” a Microsoft Digital Security and Resilience manager explains in the blogpost, the focus is on “thinking about security from the ground up. We know we can do these amazing things, especially with security being front and center.”
That’s as maybe—but Windows 10 users running older or specialist hardware have other concerns. As one Forbes reader told me: “An awful lot of Americans do not have available cash to spend hundreds of dollars for new computers just to make Microsoft happy. You can see it in the only 30% adoption. My replacement cost was $1,200.”
