Microsoft has just played its joker card twice in a week, forcing upgrades on millions of Windows PC owners. This will raise serious alarm bells for hundreds of million of users who may now need to upgrade their PCs with no alternative options.
We’re talking Windows 10, and the 850 million users who either can’t or won’t move to Windows 11. Of those, some 400 million likely can’t move given the age of their PCs which do not have the prerequisite hardware security to make the move. The end of support deadline is fast approaching, and the company has shown no signs of relaxing its hurdles.
But in the space of week we have seen confirmation that “starting next month, Microsoft will begin forcibly installing its new Outlook email client on all Windows 10 devices,” as well as reports that “Microsoft has started the forced rollout of Windows 11 24H2 to eligible, non-managed systems running the Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 22H2 and 23H2.”
This follows the company warning last year — as it deployed the KB5001716 patch on Windows 10 PCs — that “when this update is installed, Windows may attempt to download and install feature updates to your device if it is approaching or has reached the end of support for your currently installed Windows version.”