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Valve is very smartly building up a competing platform with Steam OS. Microsoft is trying really hard to position itself so that it can kill Win32; they backped

Valve is very smartly building up a competing platform with Steam OS. Microsoft is trying really hard to position itself so that it can kill Win32; they backpedaled hard with Windows 10, but only because their own tech isn't there yet, and the user experience with no transition period was awful. I'm sure they'll try again; controlling the market would simultaneously solve their malware problem (real sandboxing and the ability to remotely kill malicious apps) and make them buckets of money. It would also be terrible for users, who would lose their freedoms over their own machines in favor of the Microsoft Walled garden.

Silhouette 11y ago
Well, if any organisation is influential enough to make the year of Linux on the desktop actually happen, it's Microsoft. I find it extremely hard to believe their big corporate customers would accept that kind of walled garden. Of course, based on what we've seen with Windows 10, it seems Microsoft aren't foolish enough to go up against their big customers and would rather produce a very different product under the same branding that doesn't have the unwanted restrictions or anti-features. That seems a far more likely outcome even if they try to move the low-end/consumer market into more of an app store model. And if they do try that, then if any organisation is influential enough to steal the gaming market from them, it's Valve.
- lmz 11y ago
  If you sell it as "only allowing authorized applications to run on domain-joined computers" it doesn't sound so bad.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    Perhaps, but the next question any sysadmin is going to ask is "Authorized by whom?" and the conversation is likely to end shortly after the answer to that one. Microsoft have spent much of the past two years training everyone that their advice on new or updated software simply can't be trusted any more. They'll recommend updates even when you have actively indicated you don't want them. They'll override those indications and offer the same thing again anyway. They'll even shove things out and call them security updates when they have nothing to do with security. I expect they'll get away with that, up to a point, with home users. I've seen plenty of people who think it's wonderful that they've got a free upgrade to Windows 10, even if they don't know why they should like it, because it's newer and so must be better, right? Within that market, Microsoft is still a big brand with a lot of weight. But professional sysadmins and "power users" aren't nearly as easily convinced. I doubt MS would get away with the kind of half-truth you mentioned for more than a moment within that community, because it would be all over every online forum within 24 hours just like the GWX control panel, the policies to set on domain machines to block Windows 10, the warnings about the IE security update that also introduced the ad, and so on.

Silhouette 11y ago

Well, if any organisation is influential enough to make the year of Linux on the desktop actually happen, it's Microsoft. I find it extremely hard to believe their big corporate customers would accept that kind of walled garden. Of course, based on what we've seen with Windows 10, it seems Microsoft aren't foolish enough to go up against their big customers and would rather produce a very different product under the same branding that doesn't have the unwanted restrictions or anti-features. That seems a far more likely outcome even if they try to move the low-end/consumer market into more of an app store model. And if they do try that, then if any organisation is influential enough to steal the gaming market from them, it's Valve.

lmz 11y ago
If you sell it as "only allowing authorized applications to run on domain-joined computers" it doesn't sound so bad.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  Perhaps, but the next question any sysadmin is going to ask is "Authorized by whom?" and the conversation is likely to end shortly after the answer to that one. Microsoft have spent much of the past two years training everyone that their advice on new or updated software simply can't be trusted any more. They'll recommend updates even when you have actively indicated you don't want them. They'll override those indications and offer the same thing again anyway. They'll even shove things out and call them security updates when they have nothing to do with security. I expect they'll get away with that, up to a point, with home users. I've seen plenty of people who think it's wonderful that they've got a free upgrade to Windows 10, even if they don't know why they should like it, because it's newer and so must be better, right? Within that market, Microsoft is still a big brand with a lot of weight. But professional sysadmins and "power users" aren't nearly as easily convinced. I doubt MS would get away with the kind of half-truth you mentioned for more than a moment within that community, because it would be all over every online forum within 24 hours just like the GWX control panel, the policies to set on domain machines to block Windows 10, the warnings about the IE security update that also introduced the ad, and so on.