TL;DR;

Capitalists gonna capitalise,

Fiscal gain is always going to be the reason behind decisions, even if it doesn’t seem like it on the face of it.

Especially microsoft, with it’s history.

I’ll preface this with, this is just my opinion etc…

I say must, should, has to, etc with the conviction of my opinion, not proof of objective fact.

i have some insight into the subject/industry but nothing i’d be willing to verify with anyone, so make of that what you will.

It’s less a specific thing to point to and more of a general “profit driven company is going to make profit driven decisions”, even if perceived altruism was deemed the best fiscal decision, the primary goal is still commercial viability.

A full extra year of security updates requires resources.

Unless they are doing something wildly outside the norms of software development, that means development, testing, deployment, hosting, tooling, marketing/PR, support and more.

There’s both CapEx and OpEx costs to that kind of endeavour.

For a product of any size that’s a non-zero resource cost, for a product the size of windows that’s a big number, perhaps not in the grand scheme, but it’s a non-trivial amount.

That is historically not the kind of thing that microsoft would do/has done just for the altruistic benefit of it’s users.

Feel free to provide examples to the contrary, i’d be pleasantly surprised.

So assuming it’s not altruism that drives this decision, the only other conclusion i could come up with was commercial viability/profit/money.

That might be a failure of imagination on my part.

The projected cost of not doing this must outweigh the projected benefit of going through with it.

Be that in goodwill, user/customer retention, PR, straight up sales or something else, there must be a benefit that outweighs the cost of just dropping support.

I could speculate on specifics but it’d mostly be rehashing the thousands of articles on poor decisions (and poor timing) around the whole win 11 rollout and windows in general.

i don’t mean this from an old man shouts at cloud viewpoint, i don’t particularly care for windows(or microsoft) but I’m not a rabid hater.

Microsoft has some good products that i use regularly, despite their constant and repeated attempts to enshittify all of the end user experiences they can in pursuit of fiscal gain.

That being said, the win 11 rollout has been a shambles on many fronts.