But muh platform growth!?!?! It just needs more AI, that'll get the people upgrading

That's the point, make wi does 10 worse so people will update

I just dual booted Linux Mint yesterday when I was reminded of the Win 10 end of service date, and hope to keep with it as my main system.

Linux has come a long way with compatibility since I last tried it ~10 years ago. The fact that Steam games ran perfectly without an evening of configuring settings blew my mind.

Windows media center alone is worth resurrecting win7 for.

Agreed, and I would think XP was the stubbornly popular version. People were on there for years after end of support.

A large amount of people still clinging to Win 10 because the only other (Windows) option is upgrading to 11 doesn't mean it's "popular" so much as it means people want 11 even less than they wanted 10.

Umm maybe it’s stubbornly popular because devices running it can’t be updated. My OG surface book (a Microsoft flagship device for awhile) is great hardware, but can’t update to 11. My gaming laptop is even better hardware but doesn’t meet the win11 requirements. Because they are sealed devices. I literally couldn’t if I wanted to.

One of the definitions of “popular” is going to blow your mind.

That's when an operating system is supposed to do. They make mistakes when they make it worse. Usually, the operating system starts worse and eventually gets tolerable. That happened with Windows 10. Initial versions were far inferior to Windows 7, but now it's at a pretty good state. Windows 11 is a pile of fucking garbage. There is no compelling feature in Windows 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade. There are compelling reasons not to upgrade, such as advertising, menus that require more clicks to get the same shit done, forced use of Microsoft account, etc.

There's also the fact that Windows 11 refuses to run unless you have a handful of specific hardware in your computer, such as TPM 2.0, and a relatively modern processor. There is no technical reason for this requirement, it was discovered very early on that if you override the check it will install and run just fine. But Microsoft seems determined to get people to throw away their older but still perfectly good computers.

That is a very big part of why Windows 10 is still so popular. If you have a computer from six or seven years ago that you've upgraded once or twice, it's probably still perfectly good. No reason to throw it away for Windows 11 when you can keep on trucking with Windows 10.

Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).

Since the bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.

At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.

Start jacking up 10 and we'll all go to Linux

It's a direct result of their corporate culture.
MS has different teams competing with each other, and keeping something running well for years won't get you noticed for a promotion.
You have to do something new to get ahead, preferably more so than the other team working next to you . So that's what everyone at MS is trying to do.

This is why there are multiple Teams apps, multipe Skype apps, multiple current Office versions and multiple Microsoft login portals side by side now.
It's why Outlook licensing has a different backend than all other Office apps.
It's why there are several Windows development branches running in parallel, and several different systems handling updates.
It's why there's a dozen different overlapping M365 admin portals that keep changing their UI, and settings keep getting moved around between them.

It makes absolutely no sense for the end user, but it makes sense inside MS' internal corporate structure.

Probably more like, “we’ll make Windows 10 indistinguishable from Windows 11, at which point people will have no reason to stick with Windows 10” (unless their computers can’t update to Windows 11, like my laptop)

Or maybe I’m just showing that I know nothing about how updates work and that I perhaps shouldn’t be commenting in a technology community…

I want old features and less. 😞

(I'm still switching to Linux.)

rub out Windows 10

Whatever is your kink, bro.