to: comp-whistleblower@ec.europa.eu
To whom it may concern
This is a formal antitrust complaint against Microsoft and Intel, and other hardware vendors, for making hundreds of millions of PCs “obsolete” for no good reason.
When Microsoft launched Windows 11, they formalized a set of hardware requirements for its “new” operating system, making hundreds of millions of completely functional PCs obsolete. This forces individuals and companies to upgrade or replace their fully functional computer hardware if they want to upgrade to Windows 11. The official support for Windows 10 ends in October of 2025, which is a little less than a year from now.
If the EU is serious about the environmental impact of the computing industry, and about antitrust, then they should look into this.
Microsoft claims that the requirements for running Windows 11 are reasonable, when in fact they are not. The biggest hang-up is with the TPM platform. There is nothing, from a technical standpoint, that would require newer versions of the TPM platform for Windows 11 to function.
What’s worse, sending 100 of millions of fully functional computers to the scrapyard will increase the never ending negative impact on the environment that the computer industry has.
Microsoft is enjoying a massive dominance (and monopoly) in the operating system market. They have been known to work with other hardware manufacturers like Intel and AMD in the past. It comes as no surprise that all of these companies stand to benefit from the replacement or upgrade of hundreds of millions of computers.
I am an active computer professional since 1985 and have been working with Open Source since the late 1980s as well as hardware and software development. One of my own computers, an Intel Core i7 with 64GB of RAM and 2x2TB of SSD storage is considered to be obsolete by Microsoft since it cannot, officially, run Windows 11. This is simply untrue, but Microsoft is refusing to allow its Windows 11 operating system to run on this hardware.