When large public companies have good news to share, they write a press release and put it on the wires so that the publications that cover them will blast that message out for everyone to read. When they have bad news to share, they publish a blog post late on a Friday afternoon before a long holiday weekend.

And when they havereallybad news to share, they bury it at the end of an unrelated press release or blog post, hoping no one will notice.

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Now that you're armed with that knowledge, I invite you to read this unsigned Microsoft support article, published today and titled "How we are maximizing value in Windows 10." There, in what's essentially a footnote, you will find this casual one-liner:

"The Windows 10 end-of-support date of October 14, 2025, is unchanged."

To the untrained eye, that's a fairly bland statement. If it's unchanged, it must not be news, right?

Allow me to translate for you: Many of Microsoft's customers are still running Windows 10. Some of them are doing so by choice; others are doing so because they have perfectly functional PC hardware that runs Windows 10 but doesn't meet Windows 11's strict compatibility requirements. For all of those PCs in all of those homes and offices, Microsoft is going to stop sending security updates in less than two years, when that end-of-support date rolls around. Those customers will have the difficult choice of continuing to use unsupported software, making them vulnerable to online attackers, or throwing away perfectly good hardware and paying for new PCs.

Many of those customers have made it clear to Microsoft that they're not happy about this decision. In California, the nonprofit public-interest group CALPIRG has written an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, asking him to rethink that policy, "Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows 10," they argue, "could cause the single biggest jump in junked computers ever, and make it impossible for Microsoft to hit their sustainability goals."

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Microsoft's announcement today is the company's way of saying, "Nope. No extension. Sorry, not sorry."

As I've noted previously, Microsoft has painted itself into a very weird corner here, essentially competing with itself