Ask Paul: April 28 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Thanks to some great reader questions, here's an epic installment of Ask Paul to get the weekend started a bit early.
Too big to fail
johnlavey asks:

What if INTEL rolls over and plays dead....or actually fails....who will do all the "stuff" they do? To what extent will the US, to name just one country, be impacted?

I don't see Intel failing, and to be fair, it still controls a majority share in the PC and datacenter/server markets. It's just that those markets are doing poorly right now, and unlike Microsoft, which differentiated beyond those markets, Intel has not. (It tried: its mobile efforts went nowhere and Intel sold off most of it.)

Intel's new strategy is ... interesting. Meaning, I get it, but it's risky, and in the short term it is very expensive. And if there is any indication that it starts missing its milestones along the way, the impact will be devastating to its stock price and its cash flow. A sort of reverse virtuous cycle, if you will.

The most likely outcome here is that Intel emerges as a smaller and less influential company. It will almost certainly retain its market share lead in the PC market, albeit with a smaller share. But it will also almost certainly lose more share in the datacenter/server space to more efficient competition, most likely Arm-based. The trick for Intel is to grow, and for that to work, it needs its foundry strategy to pay off. It needs to become the next TMSC.

And that’s a long shot. But if they can win some key partnerships there---Apple being the white whale of this industry---then they can be successful. They just have to actually do it. And that's why I'm not sure it will happen. I see little positive forward momentum right now.

For whatever it's worth, this is what would have happened to Microsoft had it not gone all-in on the cloud. Diminished size and influence, diminished relevance, and fears for its ability to even survive.
Paid extended support
SherlockHolmes asks:

Hi Paul, with the end of Windows 10´s development cycle I wonder if there is any chance that Microsoft will extend support for Enterprise clients? Having an OS without some Updates for a few years would be really nice :-)

Yes, this is the open question about Windows 10 right now. Microsoft offered paid extended support for Windows XP and Windows 7, both of which were, in turn, the best-selling/most-used versions of Windows. And now we have Windows 10, which has surpassed both, heading into the end of support. Will Microsoft do for Windows 10 what it did for those other two versions?

It seems obvious to say yes, of course it will, that Microsoft has always bent over backward for its enterprise customers and that if enough of them demand it, it will simply do so. That's sort of a safe bet.

But were I betting money on this, I'd go with no: arbitrary hardware requirements notwithstanding, Windows 11 is Windows 10, and is most clearly viewed as just another Windows 10 version up...