Windows 10 end-of-life: A time to open up
Broadly speaking, there are two types of people in IT: those who like to tinker, constantly seeking the next best thing and those who yearn for a stable environment.
Years ago, businesses and IT leaders began to appreciate that for all the benefits promised by personal computing, tinkering and installing ever-so-useful PC applications leads to greater and greater levels of unmanageability. In fact, in the 1990s, the cost of managing a PC was estimated to cost a typical organisation over $5000 per year. So there has been a concerted industry effort to provide IT departments with tools and best practices to improve the manageability of their PC estates, which is directly correlated to the operating costs.
This is one of the reasons every IT department is encouraged to deploy the latest and greatest version of Windows. Now when it was first released, Windows 10 was promised to be the last major upgrade of the Microsoft operating system. But when Windows 11 came along, every IT department knew that they had until October 14th 2025 to migrate over to the new version. Now, with just a month to go before Microsoft stops issuing patches for Windows 10, those IT departments struggling to migrate every PC across the organisation to Windows 11, will face the prospect of running an unsupported OS – and risk major security breaches – or pay a hefty fee to Microsoft for an ESU (Extended Support) contract.
As Gartner’s Ranjit Atwal explains in a recent YouTube video, the success of Windows is its biggest handicap. Support for older hardware, peripherals and maintaining software compatibility means that the core Windows system has to support more and more “stuff”. At some point, this gets too cumbersome and Microsoft raises the bar, removing backwards compatibility for older peripherals.
On the one hand, device driver software needed by the operating system to communicate with peripheral devices, that runs perfectly well on Windows 10, is simply no longer available on Windows 11, forcing people to buy a replacement or use a risky workaround.
However, newer devices and peripherals tend to be more capable than their predecessors. So in order to provide these capabilities in the latest version of Windows, Microsoft culls old device driver software. If the device driver software is not supported then the peripheral will not work in Windows. It is basically an expensive paperweight. The closed and proprietary world of Windows software means that owners of these devices are totally stuffed.
Why should they need to upgrade devices at a pace set by Microsoft? Upgrading working devices is a wasteful and environmentally unsound practice. To remain Number One, Windows needs to become more open and there’s a role for the open source community to provide legacy device driver software.