5 ms·
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 directi
by 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.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y agoWindows market share is the lowest it's ever been. Haven't used windows myself since March 2020 and nothing is making me want to change that.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoAs far as I am concerned, the whole future of Microsoft is Azure and extracting rent from Office.
- Tozen 5y agoWell, until the LibreOffice Foundation gets a bit smarter or greater business support from some heavy hitters. Microsoft relying on Office is on shaky ground. People arguably use MS Office out of habit and since it's a forced de facto standard at work. But, there is no reason they can't switch to LibreOffice for 95% plus of what people are doing.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoLeaders of large organizations need someone outside the organization to blame when things go wrong. You cannot do that with Libre Office.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y agoMy org is basically at this point exclusively Google docs. Chromebooks for support staff and Linux laptops for devs. I think only sales is still on windows.
- ta3567367 5y agoUnderestimating the JVM there a bit. Sucks that Oracle tried to monster it, but it's a solid workhorse. Also, down with MS, leopards don't change their stripes so easily, a change of helm won't turn a company with greed so deeply entrenched in their DNA. *Spots not stripes. Or tigers.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago>Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" ... is something that failed And probably wasn't GPL-licensed. That part introduces a slight problem to the EEE process. ;p
- trulyme 5y agoNot sure why you are being downvoted, you have a point. Though it'snot about license, but more about market position. I'm also afraid that MS still has plans for Linux, but they are on the first E atm.