- The Dell COO revealed some interesting insights during the earnings call
- Jeffrey Clarke found that windows 11 lags far behind Windows 10 when it comes to end-of-support migration.
- Windows 11 is between 10 and 12% off, but that’s not surprising for several reasons
Dell has made it clear that Windows 11 will not perform as well as Windows 10 when it comes to migrating from these respective Microsoft operating systems once the support period has ended.
Log reports that Dell’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Jeffrey Clarke commented on Windows 11’s poor progress in this area during a conference call earlier this week.
Clarke said: “We have not yet completed the transition to Windows 11. If we compare it to when support for the previous operating system ended, we are currently between 10 and 12 points behind the previous generation with Windows 11.”
This is a fancy way of saying that compared to Windows 10 when support for Windows 7 ended (we can probably ignore Windows 8 as part of the transition to Windows 10 since it didn’t create a large user base to begin with), Windows 11 is largely behind after Windows 10 support ended (last month). In fact, Windows 11 is 10% to 12% behind Windows 10 migration levels.
Of course, there could be several reasons for this lack of progress compared to Windows 10, but the biggest obstacle is that Windows 11 excludes many older PCs due to its higher system requirements (an issue that has long caused frustration and controversy).
As Clarke noted, about 500 million PCs can’t run Windows 11, and while some of them can be upgraded (with a new CPU or TPM), they probably won’t (and in the case of laptops, upgrading will probably be impossible anyway).
Dell has had a good year in PC sales so far in 2025; As of the third quarter, we’re told that revenue will be in the mid-to-high single-digit range, probably around 7-8%, but Clarke notes that this will be different next year.
The PC maker expects sales to remain flat through 2026, but calls it “prosperous,” and while that may not make as much sense as a choice of words, the COO sees the situation through the prism of rising memory prices and the challenges associated with component costs. (Mainly ram and SSD and to some extent discrete GPUs with video RAM).
As we’ve seen clearly over the past month, supply shortages and rising prices are driving up costs for PC manufacturers (RAM price hikes are extreme to say the least) and so it’s inevitable that PCs will become more expensive. Simply maintaining sales levels until 2026 is therefore considered a win, as additional incentives such as the long-awaited growth of AI-enabled computing (laptops copilot+) are not enough to defend against cross-component headwinds.
Of course, a slower migration to Windows 11 PCs won’t help sales either, as people will stick with their Windows 10 machines or perhaps choose a completely different path (like Linux or even macOS).
Analysis: Some red flags, but no surprises
In short, while Dell’s sales are good right now, Windows 11’s launch is not, and according to Dell’s statistics, the company is well behind Windows 10 at the same stage of its post-support program.
This isn’t exactly good news for Windows 11, but it’s not surprising either. Why not? First, because Windows 11’s general lack of popularity is nothing new, whether it’s because people are putting off upgrading due to higher hardware specification requirements or because people just don’t like it. Windows 11 lags significantly behind Windows 10 in relative lifetime adoption.
And second, Microsoft did something completely different with Windows 10 when it announced its end of life last month, at least in the consumer space. That is, consumers for the first time received extensive (more or less) free support (there is a problem, but in my opinion it is not serious, not even financial). With a free additional year of support available, this means Windows 10 users can receive security updates until October 2026.
And that in turn means that all the thinking about what to do with your Windows 10 PC that doesn’t support Windows 11 can be postponed until next year. In short, you still have a year to think about buying a new Windows 11 PC to replace your current system, or perhaps upgrade your current PC to support Windows 11 (or leave the Microsoft ecosystem altogether).
This must certainly be a factor in Dell’s migration slowdown observed here, and given that the pace of the transition to Windows 11 may remain slow until October 2026, this may also affect Dell’s PC sales forecasts for next year.
So in theory there could be a significant increase in migration this time next year. In practice, we’ll see, and how this plays out may depend on whether Microsoft makes progress with its big AI push in Windows 11, a direction that’s proven to be quite controversial with the operating system’s existing user base.