"From where I'm sitting, Windows 11 has a worse in-use track record than Windows 10"

When it comes to Windows 10 security updates, Microsoft giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other, but there's no need to rush to Win11

- STEVE CASSIDY

My verdict is clear on the whole migration away from Windows 10 thing. The bigger the network, the easier the upgrade, along with a definite bias towards cloud deployments being more difficult and expensive than old-school, on-premises, one-PC-per-person architectures.

In a more open-minded, welcoming era, we might have received the last-minute reminders about end of support with a more constructive outlook. But this is the Trump decade, when he has encouraged people to think much more commercially about everything they do, use or share.

This means that business reception of the message about upgrading has been much more cynical than the last time this happened. Yes, for those of you who weren't IT purchasing managers back in 2008, we have indeed been here before. Not that you would have held that job title: even in bigger businesses, the role of IT purchasing manager often falls to the proprietor. Or even to the proprietor's eldest child. Nor were purchases always rational: one client did their own machine refresh buying and took some years before admitting this was because the FD was an avid gamer and wanted even the simplest PC to hold its own in a LAN party.

So what happened in 2008, and why is 2025 so different? Back then we had only just escaped global financial meltdown. Some well-placed friends of mine still say that the UK was only hours from the cash machines stopping. Rumour had it that some African countries turned up and asked politely if they could have their gold deposits back; it was a pretty desperate period. Hardly surprisingly, sales of more expensive kit exhibited a degree of lag.