4 ms·

Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right? Nobody would get into the Operati

Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right? Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).

MarsIronPI 10mo ago
No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.
- g947o 10mo ago
  Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.
  - MarsIronPI 10mo ago
    Wow, so the only OSs with no money in them are the FOSS ones. Makes sense, though. (No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)
    - jm4 10mo ago
      Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up. The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.
      - pjmlp 10mo ago
        Except many of those contributions never land upstream. Hence why we usually with the cloud provider distros. Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.
        MarsIronPI 10mo ago
        > Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob. What do you mean? Are they violating the GPL by not releasing the modified source?
        pjmlp 10mo ago
        Most of their stuff isn't GPL anyway, hence why drivers are mostly in userspace.
        jm4 10mo ago
        That’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead, look at how much does land upstream. Linux moves at an incredible pace. Edit: BTW the figure I cited are contributors to mainline.
        pjmlp 10mo ago
        Yet it is still a mess to support laptops, because everything still needs to be reverse engineered instead of landing into upstream.
        jm4 10mo ago
        My laptops have been running fine for years.
        pjmlp 10mo ago
        What I had with Linux did also worked fine, provided I was happy with randomly dropping wlan sessions when doing heavy downloads, using OpenGL 3.3 instead of the OpenGL 4.1, watching YouTube without hardware decoding, and having to take out the battery when it hang during a reboot. Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.
  - just6979 10mo ago
    There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome). And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.
- grvbck 10mo ago
  > MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history]
gunalx 10mo ago
Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25
- bee_rider 10mo ago
  Yep! That’s what I was thinking of. It is a cloud hosting company that keeps some legacy software around for sentimental reasons.
  - wvenable 10mo ago
    The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.
    - cbozeman 10mo ago
      It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years. BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows. Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.
  - davkan 10mo ago
    I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.
leptons 10mo ago
If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
- tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
  The Pro version doesn't remove the adverts.
  - leptons 10mo ago
    What "adverts"? I've been on Pro for over a decade on a dozen machines and have never seen one single "advert".
    - tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
      From https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-you-disable-these-settings/ https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-yo... "It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."

MarsIronPI 10mo ago

No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.

g947o 10mo ago
Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.
- MarsIronPI 10mo ago
  Wow, so the only OSs with no money in them are the FOSS ones. Makes sense, though. (No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)
  - jm4 10mo ago
    Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up. The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.
    - pjmlp 10mo ago
      Except many of those contributions never land upstream. Hence why we usually with the cloud provider distros. Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.
      - MarsIronPI 10mo ago
        > Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob. What do you mean? Are they violating the GPL by not releasing the modified source?
        pjmlp 10mo ago
        Most of their stuff isn't GPL anyway, hence why drivers are mostly in userspace.
      - jm4 10mo ago
        That’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead, look at how much does land upstream. Linux moves at an incredible pace. Edit: BTW the figure I cited are contributors to mainline.
        pjmlp 10mo ago
        Yet it is still a mess to support laptops, because everything still needs to be reverse engineered instead of landing into upstream.
        jm4 10mo ago
        My laptops have been running fine for years.
        pjmlp 10mo ago
        What I had with Linux did also worked fine, provided I was happy with randomly dropping wlan sessions when doing heavy downloads, using OpenGL 3.3 instead of the OpenGL 4.1, watching YouTube without hardware decoding, and having to take out the battery when it hang during a reboot. Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.
- just6979 10mo ago
  There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome). And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.
grvbck 10mo ago
> MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history]

gunalx 10mo ago

Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25

bee_rider 10mo ago
Yep! That’s what I was thinking of. It is a cloud hosting company that keeps some legacy software around for sentimental reasons.
- wvenable 10mo ago
  The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.
  - cbozeman 10mo ago
    It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years. BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows. Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.
- davkan 10mo ago
  I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.

leptons 10mo ago

If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.

tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
The Pro version doesn't remove the adverts.
- leptons 10mo ago
  What "adverts"? I've been on Pro for over a decade on a dozen machines and have never seen one single "advert".
  - tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
    From https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-you-disable-these-settings/ https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-yo... "It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."