6 ms·

>> getting worse and worse at an alarming rate That's because Windows Division does not exist anymore as a separate business unit within MS. It's now a part of

• iforgotpassword 7y ago
  I'm wondering if this is really the right move as in "desktop is definitely going down and everything will be web based". In that case sure, why bother throwing money at it. But should we realize in a couple years that this was overhyped and desktop OS and apps won't go away, everyone will have migrated to OSX or Linux if Windows quality continues to decline at that rate.
  • m0zg 7y ago
    And MS as a company would probably be just fine with that. They could even port Office to Linux then. 70+% of Azure is Linux already, so Windows is rapidly becoming a costly liability in Azure. Office customers are captive, it's not like there's anything else available that could compete anyway, so they'll tolerate a lot of abuse. Until there's a realistic prospect of losing significant revenue, MS isn't going to give a shit. It's (tactically, but not strategically) the right thing to do. Win 10 with minor tweaks is going to easily last another decade or more. Who cares if Mac is better: LOB apps don't run there anyway.
  • hrktb 7y ago
    The contention might be on the time frame. Desktop OS and apps won’t go away for the next 10 or 20 years by sheer inertia of the corporate market, and the halo effect on home users. And I guess the past month/years issues don’t affect business users (corporate managed desks will have any problematic feature disabled from the start) “Everyone” migrating to OSX/linux won’t happen for many many years, even if they keep screwimg up home and hobbyist market. Corporate market is also their strong point, so money wise they’ll be fine with that.
    • Nexxxeh 7y ago
      PC gamers won't be switching to an Xbox, and so we require a desktop. It won't just be halo effect on home users, but ironically also Halo effect. The remastered collection being ported over as we speak, starting with Halo: Reach iirc.
      • Silhouette 7y ago
        And for small businesses, the analogous barrier is often "creative software". More and more administrative services used by businesses are moving online, and in some cases we're forced to use them whether we like it or not (for example, because certain tax/legal returns now have to be filed online using approved software). However, when it comes to creating reports, or artwork, or engineering schematics for a new building, or the 3D model you're going to be animating using WebGL on your new site, the dominant software is still almost entirely on desktops. Some of that software is Windows-only. There are quite a few good products that run on Mac. Relatively little runs on open platforms like Linux. And for now, macOS has its own issues for long-term professional use, starting with Apple's reluctance to give any sort of concrete guarantees about support longevity. So that can be quite a barrier to migrating away from Windows for businesses. It would be nice to think that in time Linux or other free platforms would fill the gap, but it's a chicken and egg problem. As an interesting contrast, within a very short time after Adobe went cloud/subscription with the dominant package of graphics/publication software, we had several smaller and more agile competitors entering the market at much more attractive (and non-subscription) price points: Sketch, the Affinity products, etc. We don't know to what extent any of these might already have been in development before and how much they were motivated directly by the shift to Creative Cloud, but we do know that the closest OSS equivalents have been around for years and made negligible impact, which doesn't bode well for the viability of Linux desktops as an alternative platform for "normal" business use (as opposed to, for example, specialist work like software development).
        • jamiek88 7y ago
          Simply: Excel. The sheer intertia in businesses of all sizes using Excel will probably never completely go away. It will fade out over decades. And proper excel (excel 2007!!!) is not on Mac OS , Linux or in the cloud.
  • navigatesol 7y ago
    >But should we realize in a couple years that this was overhyped and desktop OS and apps won't go away, everyone will have migrated to OSX or Linux if Windows quality continues to decline at that rate. Windows still claims nearly 80% of desktop market share, while OS X has less than 15%. Linux is around 2%. Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires it. Google requires it. Amazon requires it. Xbox Live requires it. Facebook requires it. Sony requires it. People are used to this. If you think this will affect Windows in any way, you probably read too much HN.
    • gurkendoktor 7y ago
      > Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires it. macOS does not require a cloud account. Technically you don't even need one for iOS, but most people will create an Apple ID for the App Store (and I hope this distribution monopoly on iOS will eventually be broken up).
      • yellow_postit 7y ago
        MacOS also prompts incessantly trying to get you to create and/or link a cloud account. Neither Mac or Windows really requires an account but they make it an inconvenient path.
        • Wowfunhappy 7y ago
          > MacOS also prompts incessantly trying to get you to create and/or link a cloud account. Well, kind of. It seems to prompt me once per service, more or less. If I keep closing them, I've found that macOS does eventually shut up.
      • LexGray 7y ago
        In a similar way for macOS enabling the offline root user has been under Network Account Server > Directory Utility forever. Microsoft is not alone in their logic here.
  • itronitron 7y ago
    if home wireless printers ever become usable (reliably over wifi) i might then consider web based an option, but only because i know that will never happen
    • jamiek88 7y ago
      I’ve had flawless wireless printing on Mac OS with an HP printer for years. iOS too. Didn’t realize it was still flaky. Guess I got lucky with my combo.
• m0xte 7y ago
  That explains it then. Time to move house.
• benhurmarcel 7y ago
  What is the reasoning behind that? Putting a major desktop product as part of the cloud organization seems a bit ridiculous from afar.
  • rbanffy 7y ago
    Pretty much all of their brand recognition comes from people who buy a computer that starts up to the Windows logo, or arrive at their office to find a machine that runs Windows. The Backoffice-centric ecosystem will remain where it is out of mostly inertia, but its future is as cloud hosted services.
  • xoap 7y ago
    In these situations there usually is no actual logical reason. The corporate "reason" is that a new CEO must be seen implementing dramatic changes (activity > progress). In this case I'm not sure if Satya the Saint [tm] started this roadmap, but for sure he managed to associate himself with it and take credit for it. As others said, a new CEO can easily reverse the whole process in order to have a "new" little triumph. It is all meaningless...
    • Silhouette 7y ago
      Given Satya's background, it seems fairly clear what the board were looking for when they chose their new CEO, and he's delivering exactly what we might have expected. To be fair to him, from a business perspective, look at Microsoft's share price since. As long as the cloud hype continues and no-one is looking too closely at where Microsoft's money is (and in some cases now isn't) coming from, the stock is likely to keep going up and he probably has free reign to do almost anything he wants. What is anyone going to do about it? I'm still a little surprised that none of the other IT giants appears to have identified the Windows 7 EoL next year as a rare opportunity to grab a significant chunk of the desktop market and been building a credible competitor. Even with the current trend for shifting things online, local computing isn't going anywhere any time soon, not least because many people and businesses want a level of security, privacy, longevity and reliability that online services simply don't offer. We've seen many times that a new, significantly different platform with enough "killer apps" to gain a foothold can then grow and do well, from mobile devices to games consoles and of course the whole world of cloud computing and SaaS, all of which have disrupted traditional desktop/laptop/server markets significantly while creative very lucrative new industries in themselves. I was wondering a few years ago as the intended strategy for Windows 10 was becoming clear whether an Apple or a Red Hat or even a traditional heavyweight like IBM might have stepped in. I guess no-one thought the cost/risk was attractive enough.
• abacadaba 7y ago
  Not putting effort into making Windows better is different than telling all the .9 billion Win10 users to go f themselves. But still, if all those .9 billion Windows users still decide that FOSS is too hard, who am I gaf?
  • wolco 7y ago
    If they bought a computer with it installed there wouldn't be an issue. Finding one in bestbuy is.
  • abacadaba 7y ago
    Man, karma is a bitch. Couple hours in recovery mode dealing with dns issues and reinstalling nvida drivers immediately after posting this. ;)
• achamayou 7y ago
  It's not part of Azure, it's part of Experience + Devices, which is a different top-level group from Cloud + AI.
  • m0zg 7y ago
    The _hardware_ part is a part of Experience + Devices. The software part is in Cloud + AI (AKA Azure).