Small Business Tech News: 4 Stories That Matter This Month

Four things crossed my desk this month that actually change what a small business around here should do. The short version: if you still run Windows 10 at the shop, you have until October 13 before the cheap year of security patches closes. Computer prices are climbing. Business email scams cost American companies over $3 billion last year. And the scary numbers about AI search? Some of them just got revised.

Here's the longer version, with sources, so you can check me.

1. The Windows 10 deadline that's seven weeks out (and the one that quietly moved)

Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. Since then, the way to keep getting security patches has been Microsoft's Extended Security Updates program — ESU. What most people don't realize is that businesses and home users are on completely different tracks, and one of those tracks just changed.

For business PCs, Microsoft's Lifecycle FAQ — a page updated August 24, 2026, so this is current — puts the end of ESU Year 1 at October 13, 2026. Year 2 ends October 12, 2027. Year 3 ends October 10, 2028. That's the whole runway; there is no year four.

For home users, something happened in late June that got almost no coverage: Microsoft extended the consumer ESU program by an additional year, through October 12, 2027. There was no press release. It surfaced as a documentation update and an editor's note on a Microsoft blog post. If you've read anywhere that home users lose coverage this October, that was true when it was written and isn't anymore.

Two things about the business side that catch people out.

It doubles, and it stacks. Microsoft's own documentation says the Year 1 price is $61 per device and that "the price doubles every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years." That works out to roughly $122 and $244 — Microsoft only publishes the first number, so treat the rest as what doubling implies.

Waiting doesn't save you money. This is the part I'd underline. Microsoft states it plainly: "If you decide to purchase the program in Year Two, you have to pay for Year One too, as ESUs are cumulative." You can't skip a year, and you can't buy six months. Sitting out until next fall doesn't reduce the bill — it just defers it and adds to it.

And no, you can't put the $30 consumer license on your office machines. Microsoft scopes that path to personal-use devices and routes organizations to Volume Licensing instead.

2. Computer prices are going up — and the reason is AI

If you were planning to replace those Windows 10 machines, here's the collision: the deadline pushing you to buy and the price curve punishing you for waiting are arriving at the same time.

In a press release dated February 26, 2026, Gartner estimated that combined DRAM and SSD prices would surge 130% by the end of 2026, which it projected would push PC prices up about 17% and smartphone prices about 13% compared with 2025.

The cause is memory. AI data centers are buying it faster than anyone can make it. A Gartner analyst told CRN Australia that the share of DRAM going to servers has climbed from roughly 25–26% two years ago and is heading above 40%, as manufacturers shift capacity toward the higher-margin memory that AI systems need. The chips in a new laptop are competing with the chips in a data center, and the data center is paying more.

Now the honest part, because I don't like it when people quote a forecast as if it already happened. That 130% figure is a projection for the full year, not a measurement. And Gartner's own quarterly numbers went the other way at first: on April 10, 2026, Gartner reported worldwide PC shipments increased 4% in the first quarter, because buyers pulled purchases forward ahead of the hikes. Gartner's preliminary second-quarter data does show a decline it attributes to memory costs, so the turn appears to have started — but anyone telling you PC shipments have collapsed this year is ahead of the data.

What that means practically: if you have machines you know you're replacing in the next year, there's a reasonable argument for doing it sooner rather than later. Not panic-buying — just not dragging it out to next summer.

3. The FBI's fraud numbers came out, and one line matters most for business

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published its 2025 Internet Crime Report, and it crossed a line it never had before: 1,008,597 complaints in a single year, the first time IC3 has topped a million. Reported losses hit $20.877 billion, up 26% from 2024, with an average loss of $20,699.

But the number I'd put in front of every business owner I know is this one:

BEC is the boring one. Nobody hacks anything. Somebody emails your bookkeeper looking like you, or looks like a vendor you already pay, and asks to update the bank details on an invoice. The money leaves by wire, and wires don't come back. It's not sophisticated — it's patient, and it works.

Two more from the same report worth knowing. Phishing and spoofing was the most-reported crime type at 191,561 complaints. And IC3 now tracks an "AI-related" descriptor: 22,364 complaints and $893,346,472 in losses — a category that didn't meaningfully exist a few years ago.

Here's the thing about BEC specifically: the fix is free. It's a phone call. Any change to payment details — any change, from anybody, ever — gets verified by calling the number you already had on file, not the number in the email. That single habit defeats the whole category. I wrote more about how these come in over text and phone in my post on spotting fake texts and phone scams.

4. The scary AI-search numbers got revised — downward

For about a year, the story in every marketing newsletter was that Google's AI Overviews were strangling small-business web traffic. I've been skeptical of how those numbers get passed around, and it turns out the researchers behind the most-cited study have since updated it.

The original finding was real. Seer Interactive published research in November 2025 — 3,119 search terms across 42 client accounts, 25.1 million organic impressions — showing that click-through rate on queries with an AI Overview fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% by September 2025. That's the "61% drop" everybody quoted.

Then in April 2026, the same team published an update on a much bigger sample — 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion impressions — and reported that the trend reversed. Click-through rate on AI Overview queries bottomed at 1.31% in December 2025 and recovered to 2.36% by February 2026. Their own words: after eighteen months of decline, "something unexpected happened in early 2026: the trend reversed."

They also revised the other number people quote. The finding that pages cited inside an AI Overview get more clicks than pages that merely rank on the same page? That was measured at about 35% in the November data. The April update puts it closer to 120%.

I'm not telling you AI search is harmless — queries with an AI Overview still convert to clicks at a lower rate than queries without one. I'm telling you the ground is moving fast enough that a statistic from last fall may be describing a world that no longer exists, and a lot of people are still selling services off the scarier version. If somebody quotes you a number about AI search, ask what month it's from. I went through this same exercise on the marketing statistics behind Facebook ads and found the same pattern.

The short version

• Windows 10, business machines: cheap year of patches ends October 13, 2026. $61/device, doubles annually, and it's cumulative — waiting costs more, not less.
• Windows 10, home machines: quietly extended to October 12, 2027. Free, or $30 for up to ten devices.
• Hardware: Gartner forecast PC prices up ~17% this year on memory costs. If a replacement is coming anyway, sooner beats later.
• Fraud: BEC cost US businesses $3.05 billion in 2025. Verify every payment-detail change by phone, using the old number.
• AI search: the worst-case numbers were revised upward in early 2026. Check the date on any stat somebody quotes you.

Frequently Asked Questions

One last thing

Two of these four stories changed after they were first reported — the consumer Windows deadline moved with no announcement, and the AI-search research reversed itself. That's not unusual anymore, and it's why I put dates on everything.

If you're around Valdosta, Hahira, or anywhere in South Georgia and want somebody to just tell you what applies to your shop — give me a call. Most of these questions take ten minutes to answer, and I'd rather you hear it straight than from whoever's selling the scariest version.