7 ms·

Follow the money. Most businesses follow the Jerry Maguire theory. "Show me the money!". When it became abundantly clear that Linux wasn't going away, and tha

Follow the money. Most businesses follow the Jerry Maguire theory. "Show me the money!". When it became abundantly clear that Linux wasn't going away, and that cloud computing was growing fast, Microsoft pivoted. That plus Ballmer leaving along with all his preconceived Windows Everywhere notions.

dylan604 6y ago
Couldn't it also be that Microsoft is no longer concerned that the year of Linux as a desktop is never going to happen. Consumer use of Linux OS as a daily driver is never going to be a threat to Microsoft's strangle hold. They know this now. They did not 100% know this in the 90s.
- mohaine 6y ago
  I personally don't think they know this now. As originally defined year of Linux as a desktop is never going to happen but I know lots of people that never come close to a Windows desktop these days. Lots of former windows desktops have been replaced with Phones, Tablets and Chromebooks. While these are not all Linux, they do replace what would have historically been a Windows sale. MS losing mobile killed the idea of Windows everywhere and once they lost that they had to play well with others or risk sales in other places.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    Microsoft's monopoly now is over Office, not Windows.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Calling any phone, tablet, or Chromebook "Linux" is only true in the strictest sense that they us a Linux kernel. Everything that is the Linux Desktop experience was scrapped and replaced.
    - thekyle 6y ago
      Well Chrome OS at least can install any Debian app. They work pretty well too and are the closest thing Chrome OS has to native desktop apps.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        For that matter, so can Windows these days. Somehow I don't think that's what any "Linux on the Desktop" people had in mind.
        chao- 6y ago
        I completely agree, but it is worth pointing out that even "the desktop" looks different from how it did when the phrase originated, to say nothing of the digital tools and spaces that are not desktops. As a daily user of Linux desktops for over a decade (and known to be stick-in-the-mud about my desktop experience), even I have awoken to some shifts in my perspective and expectations, but only in an after-the-fact manner.
    - dheera 6y ago
      > Everything that is the Linux Desktop experience was scrapped and replaced. That's true of every Linux distro as well. Ubuntu pretty much scrapped all the shitty looking window managers of RedHat (FWHM, FWHM95, AfterStep, etc.) and replaced it with another one that looks nice but has shitty usability. Building a good looking and functional window manager on top of a Linux kernel still is a form of Linux in some sense.
    - mohaine 6y ago
      True in the strictest sense is test best kind of true.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I think Microsoft realizes that there is very little profit in consumer grade stuff. Apple makes a profit on phones. Android is just a backdoor that provides access for google's spying operation.
- badRNG 6y ago
  It depends what we mean by "Linux" or the "Linux Desktop." Chromebooks aren't going away, non-Chrome OS Linux desktop usage has seen quite a large uptick in recent years (likely due to ease of installation and compatibility tools like Proton.) Linux, even Ubuntu, has over the years been a headache, however Pop!_OS is the best OS for software development today in my opinion. Regardless of distro, hardware support has greatly increased (as opposed to 2010, where getting a Wi-Fi driver or trackpad to work appropriately on Ubuntu was a chore.) The primary way people interact with the internet today isn't through a system running Windows, it is through an Android or iOS device. If I have a budget of $200 for a laptop for school, it seems improbable that I'm going to go for a Windows system over Chrome OS unless there is some custom software I can't live without. I'm sort of outta my lane here, but it seems to me that Microsoft's cloud offerings are going to be far more lucrative and important than revenue earned from desktop OS licensing at some point. Tools like VS Code integrate well with Azure for a reason. Linux dominating the server space isn't something Microsoft is ignoring either.
  - causality0 6y ago
    For a while there it seemed like people were getting more and more computer-savvy. They knew what files formats are. They liked having big USB drives. They got excited over faster internet speeds. You could make the argument that Linux was going to make the CLI mainstream again. That's dead now. People don't care. They buy a phone because it has a higher resolution screen and then run it in low-res because that's the default and they don't know the difference. Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG.
    - codetrotter 6y ago
      > Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG. I agree somewhat but I think the AP test website makers should take some responsibility too. Limiting the upload to only JPEG and PNG is silly IMO. Wouldn’t really cost them anything to install ImageMagick on their server and accept a much wider range of file formats. ImageMagick can read and convert pretty much any image format you throw at it, check out the list of formats here: https://imagemagick.org/script/formats.php https://imagemagick.org/script/formats.php And yes, ImageMagick supported file formats include even HEIC. I mean, if we are going to talk about having knowledge about file formats and technical details about computers, perhaps the kids aren’t the only ones lacking – so too do the people that keep insisting on only PNG or JPEG in 2020 IMO. Why force everyone to deal with these things when the server could handle much more of it automatically?
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  If Desktop Linux was as influential as server Linux, you bet (post Ballmer) Microsoft would be on board. Look at how quickly Microsoft moved on Office for the iPad and Android after Ballmer left the company. Ballmer era Microsoft was dogmatic "Microsoft Everywhere". Post Ballmer Microsoft is pragmatic. It's a huge contrast. Desktop Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft's strategy, they are now much more cloud focused. Office and Azure, are their big profit centers. Ballmer would be rolling over in his grave[1] if he knew how far down the pecking order Windows had fallen. [1] I know
- lumost 6y ago
  The year of the nix desktop may be fast approaching. The use of ChromeOS and MacOS has seen steady growth, on Mobile IOS and Android both have nix origins. As a developer of primarily cloud based systems, I find using a windows desktop to be unusual - none of my familiar tools, expectations, and development practices fit with Windows. Based on the macbooks that I'm surrounded by at work, I'd have to imagine others feel similarly. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    If in the 90s you told a linux advocate that "we will achieve the year of the linux desktop by having everybody buy macs" they'd laugh. That doesn't count. OSX has unix at its heart but the open sourceness of the OS is the key thing that advocates want. OSX isn't open source.
    - lumost 6y ago
      fair, it probably depends on what your goal is. OSX certainly relies on more open source code, components, and tooling than windows - but less than debian.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    I know StatCounter isn't 100% accurate, but I'm stunned at OS X being at 27 percent usage share in the United States. I had always assumed OS X usage was still at about 10%, which is where it was a decade ago. I suspect we'll see this creep up even further in the coming years, if Apple releases cheaper MacBooks (~$700), in response to Apple Silicon lowering their manufacturing costs. They've dramatically lowered the costs of the entry-level iPhones, iPads and watches and I don't see why that same strategy wouldn't come to the Mac.
    - lumost 6y ago
      I think that gets to a major risk of continued windows focus by Microsoft, in 5 years it's possible that Windows market share will be below 50% with most new software written for nix systems. History has not looked kindly on OS's in such an environment, and further market declines may be inevitable as windows begins to look like a legacy platform or a use case specific platform (Games). I'd have to imagine that Microsoft has been thinking of what their Desktop OS play would be at that point, allowing windows to simply die a slow and profitable death would threaten other business lines such as Gaming. Non-Apple hardware vendors will be looking for OSX like systems to compete with a possibly dominant OSX platform.
- CrankyBear 6y ago
  The old desktop is not where the money anymore. It's on smartphones, where the global leader is Linux-based Android, and on cloud-based services, which by and large don't care what OS you're using.
SSLy 6y ago
That's the literal quote in the article, you know.
rbanffy 6y ago
Another way to say this is that Microsoft loves Linux the same way a spider loves a fly.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Green Eggs and Ham, as told from the pig's perspective.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  As does any business.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Microsoft is one of the very few companies that'd benefit from Linus losing market share.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Any business loves any fly (potentially profitable good or service) the way a spider does. Only so long as it recognises a potential gain. Linux just happens to be Microsoft's fly for now.
nimbius 6y ago
"Pivoted" is a generous description. Scrambled is more like it. Ballmers tenure did almost irreperable damage to the thesis that Microsoft was a modern technology company that could operate outside cloth-walled cubicles and quarterly corporate financial planners. With every advance in Linux, Ballmer doubled down on in-house developed analogues and near-Khrushchev rhetoric against not just the OS but the fundamentals of open source. While Google and AWS catered with open arms to all, Ballmers vitriol led redmond down a myopic path of scorched earth ideations in the service of a dead business model. A cogent argument could be formented that XBox revenue and corporate license renewals were the only thing that kept Redmond from cutting staff and folding divisions during Steves tenure....divisions that in bitter retrospect should have folded far sooner than they did (Phone and the physical store for example.) Steve kept his corner office and the favour of the board thanks to quietly dipping into the coffers of these underappreciated touchstones of the company but in the 21st century...these werent growth. After saying in 2008 that he intended to remain CEO for another decade, Ballmer announced his retirement in 2013. Microsoft was running on fumes and while Steve managed to coast the hills, Satya was ready at the pump. The insensitive truth is that the real cancer all along was Steve.
- danielovichdk 6y ago
  Being a Microsoft empmoyee at the time Steve was CEO, i think you are grossly undermining his fundamental work to what Satya is now also capitalizing on. I don't know Satya from the inside, so I will not say anything, other than he does not seem to have initiated a lot. I might be wrong. You don't turn a business as Microsoft into a super attractive stock overnight. But Ballmer, Kevin Turner, and Guthrie to some extent put in a lot of effort to create what is now being run by Satya.
  - cameron_b 6y ago
    I'm genuinely curious to hear how you might elaborate on this. The Balmer-scream years were very formative to my outlook on the tech world, graduating high school in 2005. Only recently did I bother to see what MS had been up to in the past 10 years ( was down a different industry rabbit hole ). A colleague told me 3-4 years ago what MS had been working on and it seemed to me like there was a light switch flipped somewhere.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Put another way: Their (once) current bread & butter paradigm (Windows, mostly on desktop) wasn't a growing market. They recognized this and adjusted course. Call it what you want, but such decisions are the difference between sustained success and fading away.
danielrhodes 6y ago
This seems to be directionally correct. To compete with Amazon and get on the cloud train, Microsoft got into the services business with Azure. However, with Azure, it doesn't really matter what OS your customers are using because they are paying you for compute time either way. Thus, Microsoft could safely embrace Linux without sacrificing their revenue line. I'm not sure if this was Microsoft's intention initially, but it certainly seems to be how things are playing out.

dylan604 6y ago

Couldn't it also be that Microsoft is no longer concerned that the year of Linux as a desktop is never going to happen. Consumer use of Linux OS as a daily driver is never going to be a threat to Microsoft's strangle hold. They know this now. They did not 100% know this in the 90s.

mohaine 6y ago
I personally don't think they know this now. As originally defined year of Linux as a desktop is never going to happen but I know lots of people that never come close to a Windows desktop these days. Lots of former windows desktops have been replaced with Phones, Tablets and Chromebooks. While these are not all Linux, they do replace what would have historically been a Windows sale. MS losing mobile killed the idea of Windows everywhere and once they lost that they had to play well with others or risk sales in other places.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Microsoft's monopoly now is over Office, not Windows.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Calling any phone, tablet, or Chromebook "Linux" is only true in the strictest sense that they us a Linux kernel. Everything that is the Linux Desktop experience was scrapped and replaced.
  - thekyle 6y ago
    Well Chrome OS at least can install any Debian app. They work pretty well too and are the closest thing Chrome OS has to native desktop apps.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      For that matter, so can Windows these days. Somehow I don't think that's what any "Linux on the Desktop" people had in mind.
      - chao- 6y ago
        I completely agree, but it is worth pointing out that even "the desktop" looks different from how it did when the phrase originated, to say nothing of the digital tools and spaces that are not desktops. As a daily user of Linux desktops for over a decade (and known to be stick-in-the-mud about my desktop experience), even I have awoken to some shifts in my perspective and expectations, but only in an after-the-fact manner.
  - dheera 6y ago
    > Everything that is the Linux Desktop experience was scrapped and replaced. That's true of every Linux distro as well. Ubuntu pretty much scrapped all the shitty looking window managers of RedHat (FWHM, FWHM95, AfterStep, etc.) and replaced it with another one that looks nice but has shitty usability. Building a good looking and functional window manager on top of a Linux kernel still is a form of Linux in some sense.
  - mohaine 6y ago
    True in the strictest sense is test best kind of true.
Gibbon1 6y ago
I think Microsoft realizes that there is very little profit in consumer grade stuff. Apple makes a profit on phones. Android is just a backdoor that provides access for google's spying operation.
badRNG 6y ago
It depends what we mean by "Linux" or the "Linux Desktop." Chromebooks aren't going away, non-Chrome OS Linux desktop usage has seen quite a large uptick in recent years (likely due to ease of installation and compatibility tools like Proton.) Linux, even Ubuntu, has over the years been a headache, however Pop!_OS is the best OS for software development today in my opinion. Regardless of distro, hardware support has greatly increased (as opposed to 2010, where getting a Wi-Fi driver or trackpad to work appropriately on Ubuntu was a chore.) The primary way people interact with the internet today isn't through a system running Windows, it is through an Android or iOS device. If I have a budget of $200 for a laptop for school, it seems improbable that I'm going to go for a Windows system over Chrome OS unless there is some custom software I can't live without. I'm sort of outta my lane here, but it seems to me that Microsoft's cloud offerings are going to be far more lucrative and important than revenue earned from desktop OS licensing at some point. Tools like VS Code integrate well with Azure for a reason. Linux dominating the server space isn't something Microsoft is ignoring either.
- causality0 6y ago
  For a while there it seemed like people were getting more and more computer-savvy. They knew what files formats are. They liked having big USB drives. They got excited over faster internet speeds. You could make the argument that Linux was going to make the CLI mainstream again. That's dead now. People don't care. They buy a phone because it has a higher resolution screen and then run it in low-res because that's the default and they don't know the difference. Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG.
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    > Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG. I agree somewhat but I think the AP test website makers should take some responsibility too. Limiting the upload to only JPEG and PNG is silly IMO. Wouldn’t really cost them anything to install ImageMagick on their server and accept a much wider range of file formats. ImageMagick can read and convert pretty much any image format you throw at it, check out the list of formats here: https://imagemagick.org/script/formats.php https://imagemagick.org/script/formats.php And yes, ImageMagick supported file formats include even HEIC. I mean, if we are going to talk about having knowledge about file formats and technical details about computers, perhaps the kids aren’t the only ones lacking – so too do the people that keep insisting on only PNG or JPEG in 2020 IMO. Why force everyone to deal with these things when the server could handle much more of it automatically?
ogre_codes 6y ago
If Desktop Linux was as influential as server Linux, you bet (post Ballmer) Microsoft would be on board. Look at how quickly Microsoft moved on Office for the iPad and Android after Ballmer left the company. Ballmer era Microsoft was dogmatic "Microsoft Everywhere". Post Ballmer Microsoft is pragmatic. It's a huge contrast. Desktop Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft's strategy, they are now much more cloud focused. Office and Azure, are their big profit centers. Ballmer would be rolling over in his grave[1] if he knew how far down the pecking order Windows had fallen. [1] I know
lumost 6y ago
The year of the nix desktop may be fast approaching. The use of ChromeOS and MacOS has seen steady growth, on Mobile IOS and Android both have nix origins. As a developer of primarily cloud based systems, I find using a windows desktop to be unusual - none of my familiar tools, expectations, and development practices fit with Windows. Based on the macbooks that I'm surrounded by at work, I'd have to imagine others feel similarly. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  If in the 90s you told a linux advocate that "we will achieve the year of the linux desktop by having everybody buy macs" they'd laugh. That doesn't count. OSX has unix at its heart but the open sourceness of the OS is the key thing that advocates want. OSX isn't open source.
  - lumost 6y ago
    fair, it probably depends on what your goal is. OSX certainly relies on more open source code, components, and tooling than windows - but less than debian.
- spideymans 6y ago
  I know StatCounter isn't 100% accurate, but I'm stunned at OS X being at 27 percent usage share in the United States. I had always assumed OS X usage was still at about 10%, which is where it was a decade ago. I suspect we'll see this creep up even further in the coming years, if Apple releases cheaper MacBooks (~$700), in response to Apple Silicon lowering their manufacturing costs. They've dramatically lowered the costs of the entry-level iPhones, iPads and watches and I don't see why that same strategy wouldn't come to the Mac.
  - lumost 6y ago
    I think that gets to a major risk of continued windows focus by Microsoft, in 5 years it's possible that Windows market share will be below 50% with most new software written for nix systems. History has not looked kindly on OS's in such an environment, and further market declines may be inevitable as windows begins to look like a legacy platform or a use case specific platform (Games). I'd have to imagine that Microsoft has been thinking of what their Desktop OS play would be at that point, allowing windows to simply die a slow and profitable death would threaten other business lines such as Gaming. Non-Apple hardware vendors will be looking for OSX like systems to compete with a possibly dominant OSX platform.
CrankyBear 6y ago
The old desktop is not where the money anymore. It's on smartphones, where the global leader is Linux-based Android, and on cloud-based services, which by and large don't care what OS you're using.

SSLy 6y ago

That's the literal quote in the article, you know.

rbanffy 6y ago

Another way to say this is that Microsoft loves Linux the same way a spider loves a fly.

hinkley 6y ago
Green Eggs and Ham, as told from the pig's perspective.
dredmorbius 6y ago
As does any business.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Microsoft is one of the very few companies that'd benefit from Linus losing market share.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Any business loves any fly (potentially profitable good or service) the way a spider does. Only so long as it recognises a potential gain. Linux just happens to be Microsoft's fly for now.

nimbius 6y ago

"Pivoted" is a generous description. Scrambled is more like it. Ballmers tenure did almost irreperable damage to the thesis that Microsoft was a modern technology company that could operate outside cloth-walled cubicles and quarterly corporate financial planners. With every advance in Linux, Ballmer doubled down on in-house developed analogues and near-Khrushchev rhetoric against not just the OS but the fundamentals of open source. While Google and AWS catered with open arms to all, Ballmers vitriol led redmond down a myopic path of scorched earth ideations in the service of a dead business model. A cogent argument could be formented that XBox revenue and corporate license renewals were the only thing that kept Redmond from cutting staff and folding divisions during Steves tenure....divisions that in bitter retrospect should have folded far sooner than they did (Phone and the physical store for example.) Steve kept his corner office and the favour of the board thanks to quietly dipping into the coffers of these underappreciated touchstones of the company but in the 21st century...these werent growth. After saying in 2008 that he intended to remain CEO for another decade, Ballmer announced his retirement in 2013. Microsoft was running on fumes and while Steve managed to coast the hills, Satya was ready at the pump. The insensitive truth is that the real cancer all along was Steve.

danielovichdk 6y ago
Being a Microsoft empmoyee at the time Steve was CEO, i think you are grossly undermining his fundamental work to what Satya is now also capitalizing on. I don't know Satya from the inside, so I will not say anything, other than he does not seem to have initiated a lot. I might be wrong. You don't turn a business as Microsoft into a super attractive stock overnight. But Ballmer, Kevin Turner, and Guthrie to some extent put in a lot of effort to create what is now being run by Satya.
- cameron_b 6y ago
  I'm genuinely curious to hear how you might elaborate on this. The Balmer-scream years were very formative to my outlook on the tech world, graduating high school in 2005. Only recently did I bother to see what MS had been up to in the past 10 years ( was down a different industry rabbit hole ). A colleague told me 3-4 years ago what MS had been working on and it seemed to me like there was a light switch flipped somewhere.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Put another way: Their (once) current bread & butter paradigm (Windows, mostly on desktop) wasn't a growing market. They recognized this and adjusted course. Call it what you want, but such decisions are the difference between sustained success and fading away.

danielrhodes 6y ago

This seems to be directionally correct. To compete with Amazon and get on the cloud train, Microsoft got into the services business with Azure. However, with Azure, it doesn't really matter what OS your customers are using because they are paying you for compute time either way. Thus, Microsoft could safely embrace Linux without sacrificing their revenue line. I'm not sure if this was Microsoft's intention initially, but it certainly seems to be how things are playing out.