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> It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today. Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's wo

> It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today. Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's worked. It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want (easy-in/easy-out licenses on their whole software stack to scale with their workforce, like with O365). Ballmer and Nadella have pulled it off remarkably well - few legacy companies manage to stay in with their existing clientele whilst also adapting themselves to changing landscapes like that.

Silhouette 6y ago
It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world. Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.
- wastedhours 6y ago
  All of that makes sense from a user perspective, but why take 30% of a wide base of consumers and businesses when you can take 100% from the most profitable ones? They want to sell you an Office365 subscription for each user, whose computing needs are provided by a remote desktop served on Azure compute, which you access from a Surface device, where your business information is stored and accessed through databases on their servers and software they provide. They want your enterprise identity to be managed through their offering, and your warehouse automation microservices to run on their k8s platform. Their consumer play is looking more and more like it's Xbox focused, and some personal software interoperability with their enterprise offering. The consumer OS layer is less important now they missed mobile - they get end consumers by selling the cloud [0] to the business who sell to them, not providing the shopfront to the end user. The model they're moving towards is that the "desktop" is largely going to go. You want some software? Here's a dumb terminal and a burst of virtual CPU from the cloud to run it for the 45 minutes you need. "Installing" things (from an end user perspective) is going to seem old hat within many of our working lives. That being said, am sure a shopfront will emerge at some point, but for cloud based software, not for installable onto an OS software. That only really comes after this whole transition is complete though. [0] and "cloud" in this context not being commodity access, but the vertical software integration to go with it.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    We're just seeing the next swing of the eternal localised-centralised pendulum. At some point, it will swing back, as people realise that handing control of things they depend on over to centralised organisations that will naturally tend to act in their own interests isn't necessary or desirable, and as businesses realise that a lot of the claimed advantages of cloud computing are overstated or entirely illusory. There are some clear advantages to everyone being connected online, but it's not necessary (from a technical perspective) for everyone to follow the models that have become popular so far in order to enjoy those advantages. The question is when that will happen, because obviously the powerful interests running Big Software are almost all heavily invested in promoting the cloud model for now since they're the ones most able to benefit from it. It wouldn't surprise me if the effective opposition eventually comes from some sort of grass roots movement towards open hardware and open software, even if it takes a decade or more, rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame. It's just a shame about all the billions we're going to waste due to lost productivity and security/privacy problems with the dumbed down software and corporate exploitation that will be the norm for IT in the meantime. :-(

Silhouette 6y ago

It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world. Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.

wastedhours 6y ago
All of that makes sense from a user perspective, but why take 30% of a wide base of consumers and businesses when you can take 100% from the most profitable ones? They want to sell you an Office365 subscription for each user, whose computing needs are provided by a remote desktop served on Azure compute, which you access from a Surface device, where your business information is stored and accessed through databases on their servers and software they provide. They want your enterprise identity to be managed through their offering, and your warehouse automation microservices to run on their k8s platform. Their consumer play is looking more and more like it's Xbox focused, and some personal software interoperability with their enterprise offering. The consumer OS layer is less important now they missed mobile - they get end consumers by selling the cloud [0] to the business who sell to them, not providing the shopfront to the end user. The model they're moving towards is that the "desktop" is largely going to go. You want some software? Here's a dumb terminal and a burst of virtual CPU from the cloud to run it for the 45 minutes you need. "Installing" things (from an end user perspective) is going to seem old hat within many of our working lives. That being said, am sure a shopfront will emerge at some point, but for cloud based software, not for installable onto an OS software. That only really comes after this whole transition is complete though. [0] and "cloud" in this context not being commodity access, but the vertical software integration to go with it.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  We're just seeing the next swing of the eternal localised-centralised pendulum. At some point, it will swing back, as people realise that handing control of things they depend on over to centralised organisations that will naturally tend to act in their own interests isn't necessary or desirable, and as businesses realise that a lot of the claimed advantages of cloud computing are overstated or entirely illusory. There are some clear advantages to everyone being connected online, but it's not necessary (from a technical perspective) for everyone to follow the models that have become popular so far in order to enjoy those advantages. The question is when that will happen, because obviously the powerful interests running Big Software are almost all heavily invested in promoting the cloud model for now since they're the ones most able to benefit from it. It wouldn't surprise me if the effective opposition eventually comes from some sort of grass roots movement towards open hardware and open software, even if it takes a decade or more, rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame. It's just a shame about all the billions we're going to waste due to lost productivity and security/privacy problems with the dumbed down software and corporate exploitation that will be the norm for IT in the meantime. :-(