How Windows 11 Is Breaking From Its Bedrock And Moving Away

Opinion Say what you like about its role in the destruction of civilization, the net is still good for a few party games. Take bets on when the “Wintel Empire” was first reported as under attack, and by what. Then go and find out.

For younger readers, the Wintel Empire bestrode the IT globe from the mid 1980s to the 2010s. It still looks in place on the business desktop, but it has lost the three major structural components that defined the almost geological integrity of the giant continent of Intel chips as the bedrock and Windows as the lush life-supporting landscape on top. You can find intimations of its vulnerability as far back as 1998, but these are forced to fantasize about legal moves to divest the duopoly. That was the best anyone could hope for. The internet that most people saw ran on Wintel desktops via Internet Explorer 4. The web could not escape its embrace.

Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign… for Intel

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It’s 2025. Intel has fallen behind, no longer able to lead on the desktop or the server, and unable to even follow into mobile. For many of us, our digital environment is primarily Arm or AMD, and a Linux or Unix-derived OS. Windows on Arm64 might look like a major fissure in the once-monolithic Wintel, and if for some reason we clutch it to our bosom, then it will look that significant in retrospect. For now, it’s just a reaction to Intel not so much dropping the ball as replacing it with an angry puffer fish. 

What made Wintel special, the binding energy that created a new elemental force out of its individual components, was continuity. And backwards compatibility. Not just in old code running on the new OS, but in enduring yet flexible platforms. While successive versions of Windows could and did benefit from new hardware, a well-specified PC could transition from old to new through in-place updates. This was how Windows worked – until Windows 11. Microsoft hummed and hawed over this, which didn’t help, but eventually took the political decision that millions of reasonably modern PCs would be obsolete with Windows 10 end of life.

This attempt to upset the inertia of corporate computing in particular did not see wholesale adoption of Windows 11 – quite the opposite. The result has been painful for many, with migrations put off and then rushed. These have not been boom years. Forced expenditure and disruption are never welcome, even in the name of progress, but when the progress is so insubstantial it feels like Windows isn’t Windows any more. 

Apple, by contrast, has managed a transition to an entirely new architecture without abandoning older machines: Macs from 2017 will finally lose support in 2027 – although if you were buying an Intel Mac in 2021, it’ll suffer the same fate. But by then, you could see that coming. Let’s not even look at the Linux fetish for continuity.

To add insult to injury and further complicate the notion of what Windows 11 is, Microsoft has just revealed that it can and has taken the bloated, resource-hungry, in-your-face Windows 11 desktop experience and turn off a great deal of that to leave a streamlined, high-performance, highly task-focused version. But only for upcoming Xbox handheld devices. This is basically a pumped-up normal Windows 11 Xbox app given fullscreen access and the power to turn off chunks of standard UI and background processes. No Copilot button either. Want the same for non-gaming workflows? Don’t hold your breath.

This is the state of the once-invulnerable Wintel in 2025. Intel is withering away, in imminent danger of being turned into a political football by US President Donald Trump. If it survives that, it could face being forced into deals with competitors on terms not of its choosing, although it has released SEC filings saying this would not be the case. If it were, however, this might be no bad thing for the market, and there are cogent arguments being made that Intel could second-source Nvidia, much as AMD second-sourced Intel. That would boost supply chain resilience, market competition, and innovation – all of which happened in x86 as a result. Until something that good happens, Intel has no place to call its own. It will be trapped in an existential crisis.

All this leaves Windows curiously unchanged in the sense that Microsoft only cares to develop it when forced to by competition, and entirely changed by abandoning one of its symbiotic compatibilities with its corporate clients, that of manageable continuity. Perhaps Microsoft thinks that having got everyone in its empire hooked on Teams and Office 365, they’ll take what they’re given. It thought that way about web services and Internet Explorer 5 once. 

The curious thing is, despite the break-up of the continents, most Windows users will feel as if nothing much has happened different from the evolutionary norm of Wintel’s lifetime. The dinosaurs must have felt the same way as bits of tropical Gondwana split apart, one to become India, one Antarctica. Life goes on, just never as you quite expect. ®

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