ESU has always been an additional cost and large businesses and education establishments will already have annual Microsoft agreements in place they also have ICT development plans outlining when equipment should be replaced on 5 year cycles. If they have left hardware refresh cycles slip which is common in education then its down to bad leadership and financial planning its not Microsoft's fault they are using ancient hardware when they are wasting money; the state primary school I worked at spent £10k on a mural for the school hall and had well being days for staff where the teachers had massages and yoga lessons, one of their wellbeing session they had for the teachers the same week they made me redundant was on how to apply makeup, so whatever mess their IT is in now is entirely of their own making.
This is an interesting point.
I've worked and functioned as an auditor in a lot of companies doing all sorts of things in the increasingly distant past (thank god).
The vast majority of companies I've dealt with are on ancient Windows versions, ranging from XP to W8, it's incredibly rare I've seen a company fielding a legitimately up to date version of Windows for their overall network use. That became more and more rare as broadband became available, they'd at best get people/departments on ancient hardware/software to dial into a VPN/Cloud system running something modern while the actual backend hardware/software was ancient and still vulnerable. This ranges from banks, major insurance companies, health care both private and nationalised and a whole heap more.
There's almost always been a disturbing lack of modernisation when it comes to computer systems, probably a bit of an "under the rug" syndrome mixed with cost cutting.
I'm not refusing to use W11 because I'm concerned about modernisation, I just think it's a garbage O/S.
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