Raising this dead article as Microsoft now delivers extended support pricing details for those who choose not to migrate to the newer version of Windows. The one they were told they’d not ever have to migrate to
No, not really. Even if it was it is still annoying to do and is confusing for most people.
Ah yes, the “not easily done” crowd saying “just move to Linux”. Lot easier to remove those items than for most folks to learn a whole new platform.
Not really. W11 doesn’t pass my company privacy and security certification (we deal with a lot of sensitive data). A lot of stuff, specially the intrusive AI hooks into the filesystem cannot be removed. I mean, you can remove them to the point that a user won’t notice or think that the AI was there. But there’s a bunch of under the hood shit that still makes it a liability. Even just disabling the Bing AI BS on Edge doesn’t actually remove it, it just makes it invisible to the user. Just like OneDrive and Teams cannot be actually removed, they just exist and act out of the user eye, but we actually pay to use those so the evaluation is different. But the AI crap is not transparent enough to even be audited by an independent third party. We are already a bit weirded out by Teams auto transcript that just listens to all chats and all meeting at all times. But that shit is so bad that it never gets a single word correct. We received proof that the transcript runs locally and never leaves our sharepoint server, so we tolerate it. MS is just crap all around when you actually need to be secure or private.
So I don’t want this to come off as rude, but if you are using the pro version with proper workstation controls all of this is controllable. I work as a L5 engineer for the world’s largest outsourcing IT provider and we don’t have a single customer (from ITAR, HIPAA, Financial, Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical etc) that has been unable to move because of compliance. Some take longer to harden and move but it’s 100% possible. MS knows their audience in this space and wouldn’t release and OS that wasn’t possible to comply. (for the MOST part, obviously things like EU antitrust has made them change some things in the past).
Nothing rude, but I don’t care who you are. The matter of the fact is that MS W11 isn’t cutting it for my organization. I do not make the rules, a friend in ICT just tells me what happens at headquarters and I’m relying that info without violating NDA rules. We are not a regular company, what we deal with is beyond the scope of any of those private sectors you mentioned, it’s beyond any company in a private or public sector. We cannot just trust MS anymore, we did once and we got burned bad. Millions of records got leaked. Thank goodness encrypted by our own in-house infosec software. But still, we are more than weary and thus far MS hasn’t done anything to rebuild but rather has grind what little confidence was left.
