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This is true and Microsoft is known to be a company that has many product groups that are often in direct conflict with each other. Cloud Services is the "cool

This is true and Microsoft is known to be a company that has many product groups that are often in direct conflict with each other. Cloud Services is the "cool" Microsoft and their cloud services are now the biggest profit center for them. They have Azure, developer tools and contribute a huge amount to the overall open-source world. The majority of their customers run Linux workloads and things like Kubernetes. Cloud folks at Microsoft don't care if you run Linux or MacOS as long as you run your web apps on Azure that's all they care about and they try to make it as easy as possible. These are the guys that developed Microsoft's first internal Linux distribution. Satya Nadella comes from the Cloud/Azure part of the business. That's why Microsoft has been doing some really innovative and smart choices lately under his leadership. The Windows group are the luddites at Microsoft. Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. They only put WSL (Windows Subystem Linux) because the Cloud group wanted it. Windows group is living in the 1990's and still thinks you can make money on a desktop operating system. They put ads and use dark patterns because they're desperate to show that Windows can still make money. Their CEO is now one of the Cloud guys and for them that sucks.

flyinghamster 5y ago
Maybe I'm overly paranoid (but considering Microsoft's behavior over the past twenty years, it would be in character), I can't help but think that WSL is a stalking horse for forbidding Linux from bare metal booting on consumer PCs. Revoke the Linux distro UEFI keys for "reasons" and there you have it.
- pigbearpig 5y ago
  Yeah, I think you're being overly paranoid.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Those fears will be reasonable when most computers will not allow disabling Secure boot. Right now that's not the case for x86.
  - skohan 5y ago
    It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the measures being put in place which would make this possible, especially given MS's history. To give an analogy, there might have been a time in East Berlin where people could have said: "It's fine that they check papers before crossing into West Germany. Your fears will be reasonable when they no longer permit entry."
  - CursedUrn 5y ago
    Secure Boot is about to become the consumer standard with Windows 11. Popular online games are already starting to require it. I wouldn't be surprised to see Netflix and other streaming services require it.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Keep in mind that this is currently possible only because some governments were looking into persecuting MS for abuse of market power when Secure Boot was standardized.
- deepstack 5y ago
  I wouldn't put anything pass these guys (MS). Don't think you are overly paranoid. With MS, they backdoors, one can NEVER be too paranoid.
- coliveira 5y ago
  That's not paranoid at all. MS goal is to declare Linux a "legacy" environment, like they tried to do with UNIX in the 80s (the so called POSIX subsystem).
  - Animats 5y ago
    I think of Windows as a legacy environment, having abandoned it when Windows 7 ended. That's when Microsoft exited the operating system business and entered the ad business.
  - taeric 5y ago
    The part that really pains on this, is it is a common pattern in our entire industry. :(
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      Secure boot could be a good feature, but it can be severely abused. Some people really put effort in it to make it more secure. But the usual problems of certificate logistics leads to the case the Microsoft basically owns secure boot. Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.
      - somehnguy 5y ago
        >Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation. Which is completely absurd. Within minutes of Netflix/anyone releasing anything new I can download it via Usenet or torrents. Nothing anyone does will change that reality. They just continue to make it more difficult for the average user to access content via player requirements for various DRM schemes. Which funny enough pushes people back to pirating to avoid all the nonsense. It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.
        errantspark 5y ago
        > It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly. I can't imagine doing this, to be honest if I were asked to implement DRM I would quit, or try to make sure there are fundamental flaws in the scheme, it's the only moral thing to do if you're put in that situation imo. EDIT: To those upvoting me, software as a service is usually DRM, so maybe hold your upvote if you're complicit.
- geofft 5y ago
  Microsoft is a very large company. Anyone who's worked at a company even a tenth the size of Microsoft knows how hard it is to get the company to pick a direction. The only real direction you can get everyone to agree on is "profit," and the nice thing about the existence of Azure as one of their major profit centers is that Microsoft now has a bunch of business that depends on Linux running well. A company mostly running Linux is already looking at them as third place behind Amazon and Google - if Microsoft risks making kernel developers unable to run Linux, they risk making kernel developers unwilling to accept patches to make Azure (or WSL) run Linux well. I'm not saying they're never going to try it, since the Azure org doesn't control the UEFI signing program, but I am saying there's a significant part of the company that will say that it threatens their profits to a scale much larger than the lost Windows licenses on consumer PCs. Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). The only thing harder than getting a company the size of Microsoft to agree on something is to get the rest of the industry to go along with it too. The few cases where they've succeeded (e.g., the thing from the 1980s where they made OEMs pay them even for machines that didn't ship with MS-DOS) were when they had a sufficiently technically superior product they could use to bully people. They don't have that power anymore.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor. Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc. They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets. It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I have exactly the same fear. Trying to lock down boot on PC is pretty much exactly what they seem to be doing. Hello to shitty OS on PCs... (yes, every mobile OS is pretty bad)
- delusional 5y ago
  It doesn't matter if that's the explicit goal. Given the opportunity MS would do it.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  I think this is something MS could try. However the whole computing paradigm has changed. Laptops/PCs are now 'trucks' and the 'cars' of the computing world are phones, tablets and consoles. Ie. Laptops and PCs are mainly used for work now, and lots of that work is being done on Linux. Lenovo ThinkPads can be shipped with RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu. Several Dell laptops (including the highest end workstations) can be shipped with Ubuntu. Framework and System76 of course are Linux friendly/default. And most other makers allow disabling UEFI from the BIOS menu. Considering how much of MS' value is derived from Azure and that their main competitors are Linux-first (Amazon, Google), it'd be idiotic for them to try kill Linux again. You're right though, they'll probably try. I just have faith that enough hardware makers care about their users more than propping up WinTel like the old days (both Linux and AMD have made massive inroads).
Amezarak 5y ago
Microsoft still makes billions from selling WIndows OEM licenses. According to their financial report such sales increased 9% from 2019 to 2020. It appears you can absolutely make tons of money selling desktop operating systems in 2021. I'd be delighted to make even 1% of Microsoft's Windows desktop OS sales. Personally, I think exactly what is ruining Windows as a desktop OS is trying to cloud-ify everything and render it more like a "future of computing" operating system packed with useless AI, Metro apps, cloud integration, app stores, and locking it down for normal consumers. I mean, look at Microsoft deprecating fantastic apps like Windows Backup or Windows Snipping Tool. They want to transform Windows into a "hip" and "cool" Nadella-vision OS and that vision sucks.
qsort 5y ago
> Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. I agree with the rest of your comment, but I don't think this really works. Windows remaining proprietary is something that makes sense from MS's POV. If, say, Windows 12 were to become open source, would you use it as a development platform or as a server? I for one wouldn't, the reason why developers don't want to be on Windows isn't that Windows costs money, it's that Windows is bad. It only makes sense for MS to continue milking Windows until the bitter end. Eventually it won't be worth the effort any longer and Windows 19 or something will be a Linux distro.
johannes1234321 5y ago
> Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. Ignoring the question how much revenue they'd lose from such a move I don't think they could easily. Windows doesn't consist only of Microsoft's code, but there is the whole legacy with OS/2, DEC/VMS and certainly a bunch of external companies contributing device drivers and things. I assume there are notable parts where Microsoft can't easily figure this out anymore. Code was moved and changed over time and for open sourcing they have to be sure about each line being ok to open source. Look at Sun's process for opensourcing Solaris and where even OpenSolaris still had some binary blobs in some parts in the end after they went through the multi year process of going through it and rewriting different parts.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  There are legacy parts, but OS/2 subsys was never used, VMS was never supported. The OS has become more modular, would be easy to deprecate ancient stuff. If anyone has the resources, it is MSFT, however investment in Windows has been on a downward trend, so don't hold your breath.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    Who knows what's in the contracts ... and what code moved around and survived where MSFT has no license to share code. Sure most of the things are out, but one helper function here, one there, maybe some data type they are still using relies on code from there ... it is a huge codebase grown in different ways over decades. And a few lines in an old subsystem and some and some successor of some original license holder can use it to refinance all their investments by sueing Microsoft.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I don't know if I buy this explanation to be honest. I guess main business is office because nearly every company on the planet uses it (for no good reason in that vast majority of cases, and please don't be the guy that defends 'cloud-like' auto-save). Azure? Not too much touching yet, I am an AWS guy (I can complain here just as much). But their office software and worse their office software APIs are abysmal. I am not registering an app and describe its function to access their beta graph API just to add a task to Planner. I fired the customer that wanted that. Desktop does make money since most people use their office suite on a Windows PC. Windows isn't that important anymore, but it is still present. And the direction they go with TPM and notebook camera requirements is predictably bad. You cannot open-source Windows anymore, that would probably be a legal nightmare. Maybe parts of it of course.
- coldacid 5y ago
  Some newer parts of Windows are open source, and in other places they've added open source software to the overall distribution (such as OpenSSH). But yeah, almost nothing legacy in Windows has been or will be open sourced, due to the difficulty of tracing which lines Microsoft actually owns and which ones they only have a license to. For legacy components that have been open sourced, the only one I can think of is conhost, which they're trying to get rid of anyway in favour of the new (and fully open-source) Windows Terminal and its console component OpenConsole.
  - DHowett 5y ago
    For what it’s worth, OpenConsole is conhost, and any improvements we make there go right back into Windows. We’ll probably[1] never get rid of conhost; the worst we’ll do is make it possible to update it without updating Windows so that folks don’t have to wait so long to get bug fixes. [1]: so long as I am the engineering lead. You know how these big companies are :| (edit to add: This isn’t meant to detract from your point, just to add additional info.)
    - coldacid 5y ago
      I could have sworn that OpenConsole is a complete rewrite of conhost. Having double-checked the terminal project's readme, though, I see that I was mistaken in this belief.
temp8964 5y ago
The TPM thing for Windows 11 makes all my home PCs (5+) not meeting the requirements for upgrade, even though they all work totally fine. I am seriously considering moving to Linux desktop and I am doing research on it. I have tried a couple times in the past and my experience with Linux desktop was terrible. I am still not convinced to make the move. Maybe I need a Chromebook kind of OS for my family and a different one for myself.
- mike_ivanov 5y ago
  Don't consider - just do it. One at a time. The more you consider, the lesser the chance that you actually will. Linux desktop is terrible only as long as you perceive it as an "other Windows" thing. No, it is something completely different. Instead - make a commitment, embrace it - and you will learn to love it.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    I actually tried this approach before, but eventually something would be come a last straw to force me give up. For example, as I know, there is nothing comes close to Windows RDP on Linux Desktop. On Linux desktop, it's very hard to remote to the local desktop session from remote, also no automatic resolution adjustment like RDP.
- yakireev 5y ago
  You might have heard it before, but here it is again: your "terrible" experience might be (partly or not) due to the fact that you've been using Windows for decades and know how to solve problems. On desktop linux, you might not, so you experience friction and frustration. Desktop Linux is indeed somewhat behind OS X or Windows. I'm currently on (somewhat dated) Ubuntu 18.4 from 2018, and it is more or less on par with Windows 7 from 2009. For me that's not a problem, I liked Windows 7 and actually stayed on it until 2018, but keep this lag in mind.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I gave Windows another chance with Windows 8 after switching to Linux Mint KDE of all things and that finally killed off any desire to use it as a daily driver for good. I found KDE very understandable coming from Windows, in all honestly it felt more like "proper Windows" than the industrial accident that was Windows 8's UI ever managed. A user-friendly Linux distro like that was a gateway drug into becoming a terminal jockey though.
wongarsu 5y ago
Microsoft is a fractal of infighting and groups at war with each other. Cloud Services are cool, and Windows are the weird ones. But within Windows there's the kernel team who are cool and customer-focused, and the User layer as the weird ones. Go another level deeper and you have fights between C++ and .Net, or historically the crusade for COM+. Or the transition to UWP, which clearly at most half the Windows UI team got behind. Obligatory web comic: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big-tech-companies-plus-an-enhancement/ https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...
- Guest42 5y ago
  It’s true that there are cool groups within the organization but I don’t trust the people above who can guide via budgeting.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  Source: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Windows group is living in the 1990's and still thinks you can make money on a desktop operating system. I can't speak for others but I'm more than willing to pay good money for a version of Windows that isn't actively user hostile and full of garbage. Like, give me a Windows 2000 UI on top of modern Windows underpinnings and I'll give you $500/year. They can even keep putting out the shitty version of Windows and just make it explicitly ad/creepy-data-harvesting supported. That might still not be enough to actually make them money, I can't say. What I can say is that I feel like Window's current strategy is less about making money and more about actively trying to kill off personal computing for the sake of pushing everyone to subscription services.
- notriddle 5y ago
  Aren't you asking for Windows Server?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    No. Windows server w/ Desktop Experience contains pretty much all the same bullshit as Windows 10. Even LTSC only cuts out a relatively small portion of it.
  - letitbeirie 5y ago
    Sounds like Windows Server... 2008
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  I typically get downvoted for mentioning this, no idea why: This is basically Windows Enterprise LTSC/LTSB. That is what I use and that it what I set up for my less technically competent friends and family who are not good at navigating the ever-shifting sands of the Windows UI, the situation changing on them, a game they had not remembered installing appearing in their Programs. Working on the simple rhythm of muscle memory and repetition, they draw the Worm.
  - shmde 5y ago
ipaddr 5y ago
Under Satya Nadella watch they brought in these changes. Windows 10/11 are dark pattern products.
clon 5y ago
Where do you place the teams in charge of the steaming pile of manure that is Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Office 365 et al? Seemingly these turds have also dropped from the cloud faction. My experience seems to be that excluding dev tooling, all attempts by MS to bring productivity tools to this brave new Internet thing have failed dismally. Office 365 vs Google Suite is not even funny, if you have to use O365, that is. Dynamics 365 looks fancy at first, but make a few clicks towards settings and you can witness 5 different UX languages, one half-assed modernisation attempt laid on top of another. Plus the churn from ongoing attempts, pointless rebrands and nonsense invented by bizdev guys. Add the famous MS back compat policy and you have a special kind of hell.

flyinghamster 5y ago

Maybe I'm overly paranoid (but considering Microsoft's behavior over the past twenty years, it would be in character), I can't help but think that WSL is a stalking horse for forbidding Linux from bare metal booting on consumer PCs. Revoke the Linux distro UEFI keys for "reasons" and there you have it.

pigbearpig 5y ago
Yeah, I think you're being overly paranoid.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Those fears will be reasonable when most computers will not allow disabling Secure boot. Right now that's not the case for x86.
- skohan 5y ago
  It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the measures being put in place which would make this possible, especially given MS's history. To give an analogy, there might have been a time in East Berlin where people could have said: "It's fine that they check papers before crossing into West Germany. Your fears will be reasonable when they no longer permit entry."
- CursedUrn 5y ago
  Secure Boot is about to become the consumer standard with Windows 11. Popular online games are already starting to require it. I wouldn't be surprised to see Netflix and other streaming services require it.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Keep in mind that this is currently possible only because some governments were looking into persecuting MS for abuse of market power when Secure Boot was standardized.
deepstack 5y ago
I wouldn't put anything pass these guys (MS). Don't think you are overly paranoid. With MS, they backdoors, one can NEVER be too paranoid.
coliveira 5y ago
That's not paranoid at all. MS goal is to declare Linux a "legacy" environment, like they tried to do with UNIX in the 80s (the so called POSIX subsystem).
- Animats 5y ago
  I think of Windows as a legacy environment, having abandoned it when Windows 7 ended. That's when Microsoft exited the operating system business and entered the ad business.
- taeric 5y ago
  The part that really pains on this, is it is a common pattern in our entire industry. :(
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Secure boot could be a good feature, but it can be severely abused. Some people really put effort in it to make it more secure. But the usual problems of certificate logistics leads to the case the Microsoft basically owns secure boot. Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.
    - somehnguy 5y ago
      >Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation. Which is completely absurd. Within minutes of Netflix/anyone releasing anything new I can download it via Usenet or torrents. Nothing anyone does will change that reality. They just continue to make it more difficult for the average user to access content via player requirements for various DRM schemes. Which funny enough pushes people back to pirating to avoid all the nonsense. It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.
      - errantspark 5y ago
        > It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly. I can't imagine doing this, to be honest if I were asked to implement DRM I would quit, or try to make sure there are fundamental flaws in the scheme, it's the only moral thing to do if you're put in that situation imo. EDIT: To those upvoting me, software as a service is usually DRM, so maybe hold your upvote if you're complicit.
geofft 5y ago
Microsoft is a very large company. Anyone who's worked at a company even a tenth the size of Microsoft knows how hard it is to get the company to pick a direction. The only real direction you can get everyone to agree on is "profit," and the nice thing about the existence of Azure as one of their major profit centers is that Microsoft now has a bunch of business that depends on Linux running well. A company mostly running Linux is already looking at them as third place behind Amazon and Google - if Microsoft risks making kernel developers unable to run Linux, they risk making kernel developers unwilling to accept patches to make Azure (or WSL) run Linux well. I'm not saying they're never going to try it, since the Azure org doesn't control the UEFI signing program, but I am saying there's a significant part of the company that will say that it threatens their profits to a scale much larger than the lost Windows licenses on consumer PCs. Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). The only thing harder than getting a company the size of Microsoft to agree on something is to get the rest of the industry to go along with it too. The few cases where they've succeeded (e.g., the thing from the 1980s where they made OEMs pay them even for machines that didn't ship with MS-DOS) were when they had a sufficiently technically superior product they could use to bully people. They don't have that power anymore.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor. Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc. They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets. It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I have exactly the same fear. Trying to lock down boot on PC is pretty much exactly what they seem to be doing. Hello to shitty OS on PCs... (yes, every mobile OS is pretty bad)
delusional 5y ago
It doesn't matter if that's the explicit goal. Given the opportunity MS would do it.
Mikeb85 5y ago
I think this is something MS could try. However the whole computing paradigm has changed. Laptops/PCs are now 'trucks' and the 'cars' of the computing world are phones, tablets and consoles. Ie. Laptops and PCs are mainly used for work now, and lots of that work is being done on Linux. Lenovo ThinkPads can be shipped with RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu. Several Dell laptops (including the highest end workstations) can be shipped with Ubuntu. Framework and System76 of course are Linux friendly/default. And most other makers allow disabling UEFI from the BIOS menu. Considering how much of MS' value is derived from Azure and that their main competitors are Linux-first (Amazon, Google), it'd be idiotic for them to try kill Linux again. You're right though, they'll probably try. I just have faith that enough hardware makers care about their users more than propping up WinTel like the old days (both Linux and AMD have made massive inroads).

Amezarak 5y ago

Microsoft still makes billions from selling WIndows OEM licenses. According to their financial report such sales increased 9% from 2019 to 2020. It appears you can absolutely make tons of money selling desktop operating systems in 2021. I'd be delighted to make even 1% of Microsoft's Windows desktop OS sales. Personally, I think exactly what is ruining Windows as a desktop OS is trying to cloud-ify everything and render it more like a "future of computing" operating system packed with useless AI, Metro apps, cloud integration, app stores, and locking it down for normal consumers. I mean, look at Microsoft deprecating fantastic apps like Windows Backup or Windows Snipping Tool. They want to transform Windows into a "hip" and "cool" Nadella-vision OS and that vision sucks.

qsort 5y ago

> Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. I agree with the rest of your comment, but I don't think this really works. Windows remaining proprietary is something that makes sense from MS's POV. If, say, Windows 12 were to become open source, would you use it as a development platform or as a server? I for one wouldn't, the reason why developers don't want to be on Windows isn't that Windows costs money, it's that Windows is bad. It only makes sense for MS to continue milking Windows until the bitter end. Eventually it won't be worth the effort any longer and Windows 19 or something will be a Linux distro.

johannes1234321 5y ago

> Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. Ignoring the question how much revenue they'd lose from such a move I don't think they could easily. Windows doesn't consist only of Microsoft's code, but there is the whole legacy with OS/2, DEC/VMS and certainly a bunch of external companies contributing device drivers and things. I assume there are notable parts where Microsoft can't easily figure this out anymore. Code was moved and changed over time and for open sourcing they have to be sure about each line being ok to open source. Look at Sun's process for opensourcing Solaris and where even OpenSolaris still had some binary blobs in some parts in the end after they went through the multi year process of going through it and rewriting different parts.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
There are legacy parts, but OS/2 subsys was never used, VMS was never supported. The OS has become more modular, would be easy to deprecate ancient stuff. If anyone has the resources, it is MSFT, however investment in Windows has been on a downward trend, so don't hold your breath.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  Who knows what's in the contracts ... and what code moved around and survived where MSFT has no license to share code. Sure most of the things are out, but one helper function here, one there, maybe some data type they are still using relies on code from there ... it is a huge codebase grown in different ways over decades. And a few lines in an old subsystem and some and some successor of some original license holder can use it to refinance all their investments by sueing Microsoft.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I don't know if I buy this explanation to be honest. I guess main business is office because nearly every company on the planet uses it (for no good reason in that vast majority of cases, and please don't be the guy that defends 'cloud-like' auto-save). Azure? Not too much touching yet, I am an AWS guy (I can complain here just as much). But their office software and worse their office software APIs are abysmal. I am not registering an app and describe its function to access their beta graph API just to add a task to Planner. I fired the customer that wanted that. Desktop does make money since most people use their office suite on a Windows PC. Windows isn't that important anymore, but it is still present. And the direction they go with TPM and notebook camera requirements is predictably bad. You cannot open-source Windows anymore, that would probably be a legal nightmare. Maybe parts of it of course.

coldacid 5y ago
Some newer parts of Windows are open source, and in other places they've added open source software to the overall distribution (such as OpenSSH). But yeah, almost nothing legacy in Windows has been or will be open sourced, due to the difficulty of tracing which lines Microsoft actually owns and which ones they only have a license to. For legacy components that have been open sourced, the only one I can think of is conhost, which they're trying to get rid of anyway in favour of the new (and fully open-source) Windows Terminal and its console component OpenConsole.
- DHowett 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, OpenConsole is conhost, and any improvements we make there go right back into Windows. We’ll probably[1] never get rid of conhost; the worst we’ll do is make it possible to update it without updating Windows so that folks don’t have to wait so long to get bug fixes. [1]: so long as I am the engineering lead. You know how these big companies are :| (edit to add: This isn’t meant to detract from your point, just to add additional info.)
  - coldacid 5y ago
    I could have sworn that OpenConsole is a complete rewrite of conhost. Having double-checked the terminal project's readme, though, I see that I was mistaken in this belief.

temp8964 5y ago

The TPM thing for Windows 11 makes all my home PCs (5+) not meeting the requirements for upgrade, even though they all work totally fine. I am seriously considering moving to Linux desktop and I am doing research on it. I have tried a couple times in the past and my experience with Linux desktop was terrible. I am still not convinced to make the move. Maybe I need a Chromebook kind of OS for my family and a different one for myself.

mike_ivanov 5y ago
Don't consider - just do it. One at a time. The more you consider, the lesser the chance that you actually will. Linux desktop is terrible only as long as you perceive it as an "other Windows" thing. No, it is something completely different. Instead - make a commitment, embrace it - and you will learn to love it.
- temp8964 5y ago
  I actually tried this approach before, but eventually something would be come a last straw to force me give up. For example, as I know, there is nothing comes close to Windows RDP on Linux Desktop. On Linux desktop, it's very hard to remote to the local desktop session from remote, also no automatic resolution adjustment like RDP.
yakireev 5y ago
You might have heard it before, but here it is again: your "terrible" experience might be (partly or not) due to the fact that you've been using Windows for decades and know how to solve problems. On desktop linux, you might not, so you experience friction and frustration. Desktop Linux is indeed somewhat behind OS X or Windows. I'm currently on (somewhat dated) Ubuntu 18.4 from 2018, and it is more or less on par with Windows 7 from 2009. For me that's not a problem, I liked Windows 7 and actually stayed on it until 2018, but keep this lag in mind.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I gave Windows another chance with Windows 8 after switching to Linux Mint KDE of all things and that finally killed off any desire to use it as a daily driver for good. I found KDE very understandable coming from Windows, in all honestly it felt more like "proper Windows" than the industrial accident that was Windows 8's UI ever managed. A user-friendly Linux distro like that was a gateway drug into becoming a terminal jockey though.

wongarsu 5y ago

Microsoft is a fractal of infighting and groups at war with each other. Cloud Services are cool, and Windows are the weird ones. But within Windows there's the kernel team who are cool and customer-focused, and the User layer as the weird ones. Go another level deeper and you have fights between C++ and .Net, or historically the crusade for COM+. Or the transition to UWP, which clearly at most half the Windows UI team got behind. Obligatory web comic: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big-tech-companies-plus-an-enhancement/ https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...

Guest42 5y ago
It’s true that there are cool groups within the organization but I don’t trust the people above who can guide via budgeting.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
Source: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> Windows group is living in the 1990's and still thinks you can make money on a desktop operating system. I can't speak for others but I'm more than willing to pay good money for a version of Windows that isn't actively user hostile and full of garbage. Like, give me a Windows 2000 UI on top of modern Windows underpinnings and I'll give you $500/year. They can even keep putting out the shitty version of Windows and just make it explicitly ad/creepy-data-harvesting supported. That might still not be enough to actually make them money, I can't say. What I can say is that I feel like Window's current strategy is less about making money and more about actively trying to kill off personal computing for the sake of pushing everyone to subscription services.

notriddle 5y ago
Aren't you asking for Windows Server?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  No. Windows server w/ Desktop Experience contains pretty much all the same bullshit as Windows 10. Even LTSC only cuts out a relatively small portion of it.
- letitbeirie 5y ago
  Sounds like Windows Server... 2008
at_a_remove 5y ago
I typically get downvoted for mentioning this, no idea why: This is basically Windows Enterprise LTSC/LTSB. That is what I use and that it what I set up for my less technically competent friends and family who are not good at navigating the ever-shifting sands of the Windows UI, the situation changing on them, a game they had not remembered installing appearing in their Programs. Working on the simple rhythm of muscle memory and repetition, they draw the Worm.
- shmde 5y ago

ipaddr 5y ago

Under Satya Nadella watch they brought in these changes. Windows 10/11 are dark pattern products.

clon 5y ago

Where do you place the teams in charge of the steaming pile of manure that is Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Office 365 et al? Seemingly these turds have also dropped from the cloud faction. My experience seems to be that excluding dev tooling, all attempts by MS to bring productivity tools to this brave new Internet thing have failed dismally. Office 365 vs Google Suite is not even funny, if you have to use O365, that is. Dynamics 365 looks fancy at first, but make a few clicks towards settings and you can witness 5 different UX languages, one half-assed modernisation attempt laid on top of another. Plus the churn from ongoing attempts, pointless rebrands and nonsense invented by bizdev guys. Add the famous MS back compat policy and you have a special kind of hell.