It’s not too wrong to say that Windows 11 adoption hasn’t been as great as Microsoft had initially hoped. Just a month after the operating system’s release, the company began pushing the update to more systems, citing “positive” feedback. And much more recently, in February of this year, Microsoft published an ad explaining why users still using Windows 10 should upgrade to 11. The video was titled “Start over without starting over with Windows 11,” which idea was conveyed that the upgrade process is seamless.
Speaking of seamless upgrades, Microsoft published a new blog post on its official Tech Community website this week, busting all the “myths and misconceptions” surrounding Windows 11 upgrades and announcing the move to cloud-based Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory ) was created. The blog post is intended for IT and system administrators.
Part of that article suggests that Windows 11 is fundamentally not much different from 10:
The fact is that Windows 10 through Windows 11 is the same in design as a Windows 10 feature update. If you’re like most organizations, feature updates aren’t big projects. Windows 11 is built on Windows 10 and even has a Windows 10 version number for the highest compatibility. So you can approach this upgrade more business-as-usual.
Windows 11 is built on the same foundation as Windows 10. It is an evolution that enhances Windows 10’s strengths and addresses its limitations.
And Microsoft has a good reason for that. On the eve of the launch of Windows 11, a large-scale survey found that most business systems were simply not ready for the new operating system due to its more stringent system requirements, and that the situation was not ideal even a year later in 2022.
Harjit Dhaliwal, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Windows Commercial at Microsoft, who wrote the article, says:
Let’s discuss the myths surrounding the move to cloud-native management, with Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Entra ID, and Windows 11. In this post, we’ll discuss some common questions and misconceptions by sharing insights and perspectives we’ve gathered from the conversations which we have conducted with organizations of all sizes from around the world over the past year.
We understand that a large part of your role as an IT professional is helping manage change and mitigating the risks of implementing those changes. So why does this task seem so daunting as we consider a concerted move to cloud-native management and staying up to date with Windows 11?
These “misconceptions” have been examined at several points. Microsoft has dissected them all and tried to explain to administrators why they should not worry about such issues or concerns. They are:
Misconception #1: To deploy Windows 11, you also need to go completely cloud-native.
Misconception #2: That name change means a bigger change.
Misconception #3: Application compatibility is a risk when upgrading to Windows 11.
Misconception #4: The change in the Windows 11 experience means business productivity will be negatively impacted.
Misconception #5: Variation in device configuration increases total cost of ownership.
Finally, the gist of the blog post is summarized by Dhaliwal as follows:
While there are costs and risks associated with adopting or resisting changes, the move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 can be taken with confidence and considered ‘business as usual’. Many organizations have already built up the strength to successfully deploy Windows 10’s fourteen semi-annual feature updates to date, and Windows 11 simply represents their next rollout.
The management tools, processes, and mitigations you set up will continue to work for your Windows 11 deployment as they are now. Your organization does not have to be afraid to switch to Windows 11.
Microsoft once described how its internal rollout process for Windows 11 was the smoothest ever, and the company likely wants administrators to feel the same way about their own organizations. Perhaps coincidentally, Microsoft recently announced that it will stop force-installing Windows feature updates on managed PCs.