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This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compell

This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into Azure and AI and other high-growth business units. I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this? Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?

gyulai 1y ago
> Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms. I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe). But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too. All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment. The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps. On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Apple is also doing just fine. It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows. Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.
  - gyulai 1y ago
    > Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there. Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web. I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden. > Apple is also doing just fine. But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.
    - fooker 1y ago
      > the next generation of developers are not going to write code.
      - gyulai 1y ago
        ...the amout of code we've been writing has increased with the progress of technology, just comparing what it was like to write desktop UIs with Delphi in the 90s versus the amount of code it takes for an equivalent app in 2025. Low-code and vibecoded software from the 2020s are going to be the unemployment insurance for all those greybeards who will still know how to code in the 2030s :-)
tracker1 1y ago
Linux desktop share is up 20-35% in the past year, depending on sourcing. Still only 5-6% total for US at least, but definitely a shift. MS is almost definitely making more money for o365 and Azure than Windows (though I don't follow shareholder releases). From google's ai result Windows ($25b) is 1/2 the size of Office (54.9b) and 1/3 the size of Azure ($75b) in terms of revenue. Windows is definitely not the cash cow for Microsoft it once was.

gyulai 1y ago

> Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms. I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe). But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too. All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment. The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps. On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 1y ago
Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Apple is also doing just fine. It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows. Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.
- gyulai 1y ago
  > Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there. Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web. I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden. > Apple is also doing just fine. But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.
  - fooker 1y ago
    > the next generation of developers are not going to write code.
    - gyulai 1y ago
      ...the amout of code we've been writing has increased with the progress of technology, just comparing what it was like to write desktop UIs with Delphi in the 90s versus the amount of code it takes for an equivalent app in 2025. Low-code and vibecoded software from the 2020s are going to be the unemployment insurance for all those greybeards who will still know how to code in the 2030s :-)

tracker1 1y ago

Linux desktop share is up 20-35% in the past year, depending on sourcing. Still only 5-6% total for US at least, but definitely a shift. MS is almost definitely making more money for o365 and Azure than Windows (though I don't follow shareholder releases). From google's ai result Windows ($25b) is 1/2 the size of Office (54.9b) and 1/3 the size of Azure ($75b) in terms of revenue. Windows is definitely not the cash cow for Microsoft it once was.