Lenovo Profits Down 66% in Q2 on 24% Lower Revenue. Windows 11 Hasn’t Picked Up Net Users Since April.
Lenovo Group’s First-Quarter Profit Declined 66% (in Q1 as revenue fell 24%) -Morningstar
Rejection of Windows 11 and a dour economy have forced consumers to run their PCs until the wheels fall off.
I looked at Lenovo’s Web site, and they’re boasting that you can “downgrade” to Windows 10, even on PCs as cheap as $249.
Despite major price cuts on all their models, they can’t move inventory well.
Windows 11 has failed to gain any net users between April and August 2023, according to BetaNews, citing StatCounter.
This is a graph just showing Windows versions by market share in the Windows world.
But all versions of Windows counted together, are down to just 69.27% of desktop operating systems according to StatCounter in August 2023.
If you count all devices with an OS, Windows is 30.12%.
Microsoft really screwed the pooch with Windows 11.
It’s so bad that even after all this time, it has yet to actually cut into its predecessor.
Most new users are just replacing Windows XP and 7 machines that finally died while Windows as a whole bleeds desktop users to (mostly), Mac, Linux, Chrome OS (which is also Linux and runs applications through Debian).
Their blind devotion to Microsoft, which is now laying off tens of thousands, is not paying off well at Lenovo. It’s basically the same story at other OEMs.
I have some advice for Lenovo. Get out while you still have a company, quit sucking up to Microsoft, and give your customers what they want.
Every time I buy a laptop from you, killing Windows and replacing it with Linux gets harder.
If you don’t shape up, you’ll lose your next sale to System76 (where I know it runs Linux and can deploy the OS of my choice) or leave x86 entirely to use Linux, and you have no products in that market at all.
You have some Linux choices, but perhaps working with Microsoft, you keep the specs limited to where it’s “better” to just buy something with Windows and more RAM and replace it with Linux right away, however System76 has lots of nice systems that are price-competitive with you. Maybe some people reading this didn’t know that.
Viewing me as a “single pesky customer” is a bad idea.
I shouldn’t have had to file an antitrust complaint against you with Illinois to get you to settle to fix your systems so that Linux could boot.
Giving your customers what they want is the foundation of a successful business that wants to be around for a long run.
You lose money because nobody wants this ridiculous Windows 11.
Even Microsoft ends up competing with its own products, which users cling to years, sometimes decades after they become unsupported.
When looking at StatCounter, you still see that over 0.3% of Windows users are still on XP and using it on the Internet.
There’s a lot of people out there who simply can’t upgrade to something newer (from Microsoft, although Linux has a habit of running indefintely), because every time Microsoft releases something it can take up to double the RAM and CPU cycles, and in Windows 11, they’ve hidden the bloat by setting baseline requirements for a really fast computer to run it at all or they fake error screens to prevent you from seeing how bad it really is. ⬆