Windows 11 is officially a failure

Six months in, Microsoft’s latest operating system is struggling to gain momentum — here’s why that’s happening

A number of reports paint Windows 11 in a bad light in terms of early market adoption. The problem is that this hardly comes as a surprise to anyone. (Image: Microsoft)

This is a story that could have practically written itself all the way back in October, to be honest, but a six-month milestone — plus a few useful figures — make for a more interesting take: there’s been a number of reports during the last few days regarding Windows 11 and its market adoption, none of which paint a pretty picture about Microsoft’s new operating system. It might seem like a given that things would turn out that way — in a sense, Windows 11 were already a failure less than a month after release — but what insiders, reporters and an awful lot of consumers were apathetically expecting to happen from the start, is now happening in real-time.

The most troublesome report comes from a recent Lansweeper survey which determined that, from a pool of over 10 million Windows-based devices, only 1.44% are running Windows 11. That’s less than the percentage of computers running Windows XP (released more than two decades ago), Windows 8 (the most hated version of Microsoft’s operating system ever) or Windows 7 (whose support period ended two years ago). Lansweeper data implies that Windows 11’s CPU and TPM requirements keep the operating system from being widely adopted…