4 ms·

Well, unless somebody is going to invest billions of man-hours in porting close to thirty years of legacy code, it certainly is. Or massively invest in Wine so

Well, unless somebody is going to invest billions of man-hours in porting close to thirty years of legacy code, it certainly is. Or massively invest in Wine so that all that legacy code can run seamlessly on Linux. Time after time they get all hot and bothered about their new platform, whip up a lot of FUD, and then it flops, and we're all still sitting here working off of Win32 apps.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I wonder how much corporate software still runs on win32, most of my customers started delivering their software through the browser years ago. The only thing they accept on the client is Office.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Even then, there is a LOT of .Net framework code, and commercial integrations that don't work outside windows. Right now, working on isolating windows-tethered portions of services in order for the rest of the application to work in .Net Core (linux/docker/k8s).
tracker1 7y ago
I think the focus are on their apps, integrated services, cloud offerings and direct software. I think X-Box is probably their biggest focus for OS development. In the end, it isn't a bad strategy. For better or worse, their office software, communications and collaboration tools (office365+mail) tends to be better than competitors and price competitive as well. Their authentication platform ties into what is/has been used in office environments and expands externally. Their cloud platforms are a natural target for their developer tooling, which has made a lot of progress in expanding to support various non-ms platforms. In the end, I don't think MS is going anywhere, and the strategy seems a bit more friendly than say Oracle or IBM in similar spaces respectively. I don't think this will mean Windows over Linux any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised to see things closer to that in a decade or so. Of course Linux itself is becoming less Free (as in freedom) lately, which is another concern.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

I wonder how much corporate software still runs on win32, most of my customers started delivering their software through the browser years ago. The only thing they accept on the client is Office.

tracker1 7y ago
Even then, there is a LOT of .Net framework code, and commercial integrations that don't work outside windows. Right now, working on isolating windows-tethered portions of services in order for the rest of the application to work in .Net Core (linux/docker/k8s).

tracker1 7y ago

I think the focus are on their apps, integrated services, cloud offerings and direct software. I think X-Box is probably their biggest focus for OS development. In the end, it isn't a bad strategy. For better or worse, their office software, communications and collaboration tools (office365+mail) tends to be better than competitors and price competitive as well. Their authentication platform ties into what is/has been used in office environments and expands externally. Their cloud platforms are a natural target for their developer tooling, which has made a lot of progress in expanding to support various non-ms platforms. In the end, I don't think MS is going anywhere, and the strategy seems a bit more friendly than say Oracle or IBM in similar spaces respectively. I don't think this will mean Windows over Linux any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised to see things closer to that in a decade or so. Of course Linux itself is becoming less Free (as in freedom) lately, which is another concern.