The End of Windows
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Windows 10 was the giant step in that direction - an always updating, maintenance mode, single OS that MS will need to support. Arguably until Win 7 dies out they won't be entirely there but once they are, maintaining Windows is a much simpler affair than yesteryears.
None of this means Windows itself is dying - it only means the OS has matured enough for the needs of present and any future needs will be addressed as and when they arise - instead of inventing the future they will abide with it on their own schedule.
This allows Microsoft to focus on things that truly matter for the future without killing Windows or spending a lot of resources on advancing/supporting it. It's not hard to imagine Windows stays a very dominant client OS for a long time to come - even if the overall PC market share continues to decline, because none of the alternatives are there and nobody is going to invest the resources to get them there.
I will also add that Satya's success lies in speeding up this strategy that started late under Ballmer and also in executing so well on it. Considering the scale of what MS is doing - Office ports to iOS, Android, Windows 10 releases, Azure, ton of other Enterprise stuff (Exchange, O365, Development tools, cross platform stuff like .NET Core, VS Code etc) - the change of course and the success they are having with it all - you can't argue it's not a phenomenal achievement.
https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...
* In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category.
* In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now.
* A surprising number of people still have Flash installed.
I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk?
Most of the tasks in the real world doesn't need multiple 4K displays, including low level and systems development. Most people read stuff, and as a developer and system administrator, when the text is looking good, this means the resolution is enough.
> In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now.
8 GB is more than enough for most people. My family's Win10 desktop is happy with 4GB, my office desktop is cozy with 8GB. My own desktop has 16GB of RAM, but it runs many, albeit small, virtual machines. "The hardware is cheap, let's waste it" mentality doesn't help anyone and it's wrong. I've written some state of the art algorithms which use 1.5MB of RAM and make the CPU scream for cooling (I develop high performance computing software as a side-academic gig), so like every resource, RAM should be used sparingly.
Edit: I've no comment for flash. I think it's a forgotten remnant of old systems.
I don't remember anyone having any problems running the latest chrome or Firefox. I think people even managed to run things like SolidWorks or Matlab perfectly fine on those machines.
I develop for an organization that serves people of mid-to-lower economic strata. 10% of our users are still on Windows XP.
We get caught up in the tech sector echo chamber and don't realize that upgrade cycles for millions of people is a lot slower than we are used to.
I think that it's not surprising to see what Firefox is reporting. A lot of people go to Firefox seeking something that runs faster or better than what came with their Windows box years ago. Most of the people we serve on low-end computers are Chrome, not IE/Edge.
A friend of mine is thinking about buying a new laptop. We were looking together at what's available in the sub 400 Euro range, basically everything is 4 GB and 1366x768. Add some 200/300 Euro and 8 GB and 1080p start to appear in the lists. Guess what people buy most? The cheapest stuff.
By the way, the new laptop must be Windows because anything different will be too difficult to cope with after 30 years of training. He's replacing the old one (only 2 years old) is getting too slow. Probably a malware party but disinfecting that machine it's a hopeless effort. That one and the previous ones were periodically cleaned and/or reinstalled but there is no way to change those ingrained clicking habits. No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. I told him that he'll be back with a slow PC soon and that he's wasting his money, and I've been wasting my time.
I've used for years a CoreDuo system+4GB with Firefox then PaleMoon playing videos in FullHD on 23 and 27 inches monitors, and never got even close to hit the swap partition unless I was running virtual machines or heavy games. Now I'm on a i5 Debian+XFCE with 8gigs, one Waterfox (privacy oriented Firefox derivative, thanks to the HN user who pointed me at it) instance with 4 tabs opened and a shell with 2 tabs; here's free output:
~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 8037636 1194044 4182928 187332 2660664 6555172
Swap: 8249340 0 8249340
~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 8037636 1453204 3761776 280824 2822656 6202520
Swap: 8249340 0 8249340
[1] ~$ uname -svo
Linux #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 (2017-09-19) GNU/Linux
(a bit older RT kernel needed for low latency audio)Of note, 8GB is most popular with 1920x1080 resolution.
My main computer has 8GB RAM. I don't know why I would need more than that. Right now I have firefox with 15 tabs, qt creator and 3 terminals open and I'm only using 2.5 GB of RAM. Unless I suddenly wanted to get into heavy video editing I don't think I'll feel the need to upgrade soon.
The laptop I'm typing this on is exactly that: A Lenovo Ideapad from 2010 with 4GB and 1366x768 resolution, running Bunsenlabs Linux and the latest Waterfox (Firefox fork with telemetry removed). It's blazing fast even without a SSD; the browser starts in the blink of an eye and it takes nearly 70 tabs open to start slowing down.
Yes, the resolution can be limiting for some websites, but most are designed well enough to work fine on it. In fact, on text-heavy sites like HN I find myself browsing at 120% magnification for less eye strain. I couldn't imagine what 1080p or higher on a 15" screen would feel like, but it would likely be painful. It's actually more comfortable to read on than my iPad mini for that reason as well, and of course typing is a dream compared to any other laptop I've used, to say nothing of klunky touchscreen keyboards.
Granted, it would be slower with a more bloated Linux distro and certainly was with Windows 7, but when it comes to the OS I prefer minimalist and stable to kitchen sink and bleeding edge.
Moreover, even apps that do support HiDPI often look like crap at 125% scaling -- the default setting on Windows 10 for most 1920x1080 laptops these days. And if you go up to 150%, you only get 1280x720 effective pixels. That's even less information density than 1366x768. Most legacy Windows apps expect to be able to use at least 768 vertical pixels.
The search turned out to be more difficult than I expected, because most high-end PC laptops with good build quality had already transitioned to 1920x1080 by early 2016. I finally found the perfect model for my father and told him that he should expect to use it for a long, long time since it's the last laptop that will ever support his apps. Fortunately, it's a well-built Broadwell i5 with a number of upgradable components, so it should last well into the early 2020s.
It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users.
Websites become a problem on slow internet, which is surprisingly common in companies. This is because they are often located in cheap rent areas with little infrastructure.
Most just don't have a choice. Plenty of laptop models top out at 8GB,with 16GB either being confined to larger form-factor machines, or being so outrageously expensive that no-one in their right mind would bother.
I mean, look at the current line of macbook pros, you simply can't get 16GB without going up to the 15-inch model.
It's included in the university fees and there's no way of opting out of it, so I had to take it. Not only do they overcharge us for it, finding a seller is hard for it too, so I decided to wipe it clean and use it as my daily driver.
The screen issue does bug me though. Not just a haxxor feature anymore, all basic Windows users can leverage the split-screen capability to put two applications side by side - on a 720p screen, there really isn't enough screen space to practically do this. I think 1080x1920 or at least 900x1600 should be the standard for 2018.
Yes. The laptop I keep by the TV has 4GB of RAM, a 1366x768 screen, and a quad-core Celeron, that I think is some descendant of one of the Atom families. I tend to keep 10 or fewer tabs open, avoid sites that use really heavy Javascript (well, I do that anyhow...), and usually don't have much else besides a Bash window running. It's got a spinning-rust drive, and swapping would be very obvious. With my usage patterns, it doesn't swap. Performance-wise, it's a fair bit nicer than my phone, at least.
Works great on my iPhone X and iMac Pro? Perfect!
Could the chart be reporting CSS pixels rather than hardware pixels? Macs are only 7% of total Firefox users but the majority of Mac hardware has a "Retina" display with a higher resolution than these.
BTW, 2560x1440 is listed with about ~1% but it's not visible because the line and text is black on a black background.
In 2018, my computer only has 2GB RAM and runs more than fast enough for what I need on a 32-bit processor. I don't understand why some people always want bigger hardware numbers, rather than better software.
> * A surprising number of people still have Flash installed. I do too, I don't see how it's abnormal.
> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk?
I can barely conceive of how narrow-minded and myopic your technological experience must be that you feel only the latest and "greatest" is viable. As someone who browses the Web regularly, I spend a lot of time on places like HN, YouTube, etc. My screen resolution is 1440x900 - one step above the 1366x768. As I said, 2GB RAM, etc. This is why I've argued, constantly, against the nonsense of Chrome and "modern" Firefox. That's why users of old computers are going to Pale Moon if they know about it, or back to Internet Explorer, or just not upgrading to the newest Firefox.
Your technological experience is very much a high-class experience, but you have to understand that there are users all over the world and in all economic positions. All this push toward expecting the best and most modern only works to force out the common person - in America it's the poor person in the ghetto who still is well above the position of people in other, even less prosperous nations. Most people, if they are lucky, have a used <$200 laptop which is often a decade or so old. Library computers are often almost as old - I know two libraries which are still running their .5GB 32-bit Windows NT2000 computers as patron-access machines because they are in poor areas and simply cannot afford to upgrade.
People who have the view that everyone should have base access to the latest, greatest, and most wonderful hardware upset me greatly. I have one comment about it that seems constructive. If you think it's so important that they should have this, you should provide it. If you can't give every person who has an old reliable computer (that they can repair) the newest bleeding-edge tech (and give them service when it inevitably breaks), then you need to understand that they have valid concerns too - and help provide better software and help others like you to understand what reality looks like for most of the world.
However, it looks like Microsoft is isolating the online services from the client platform in order to de-prioritise Windows, which inherently makes Windows itself more replaceable. That creates a huge potential gap in the overall tech market, particularly once Windows 7 reaches end-of-support and a lot of people are going to be wondering about what they can do if they don't want Windows 10. (After all, if they did want Windows 10, why are so many people still not using it?)
There obviously aren't that many businesses that would be in a position to exploit such a vulnerability and start building not just a viable alternative client OS but a viable alternative ecosystem around it, but there are some. Apple could be a threat from one direction. Traditional big tech companies like IBM could be a threat from another. With the foundations available with modern OSS stacks, an unexpected alternative from (or sponsored by) the likes of Red Hat might be less likely but not totally out of the question either, or even a curveball from the likes of Intel.
So, what if one or more of them really did produce a compelling client platform and moved the whole industry back in the direction of local software and in-house operations? If the current focus on Cloud everything wanes, but Microsoft has voluntarily given up its long-standing dominance of the more traditional parts of the industry by neglecting Windows as a platform in its own right, where does that leave their online services five or ten years from now?
Maybe the likes of Satya Nadella are just much better connected in the big boardrooms than a mere geek like me, and they're confident that the emphasis on Cloud everything isn't going anywhere any time soon. But now we've been doing that for a while and the gloss has worn off a bit with all the real world problems of reliability, security, leaks, costs, and so on, I can't help wondering whether Nadella is mostly playing to Cloud-obsessed big investors and at some point those investors will prove to have been throwing good money after bad because they didn't know any better.
I wish I could agree with you. However, the QA layoffs at Microsoft were in 2014; if something like was going to happen, it would have happened by now.
The fact that they dropped the mobile market (where windows could not fit as very different hardware was involved in the beginning) doesn't mean they will miss the next shot too.
They will have an entire ecosystem up and running, and windows 10- level flexible to be tailored to whatever comes. Of course it would be crazy for them to drop it now
Every single incarnation of windows mobile / phone was well tailored for the mobile hardware of the day.
What sunk windows phone was not that it was slow, it was that it was late to go touch-first and failed to differentiate enough to make up for it. That and tightly controlling the vendors while up against android made the quality of windows phone itself irrelevant.
This is such an utterly clueless explanation of why Windows Phone failed that it’s kind of stunning. Until, of course, you remember the culture-induced myopia I described yesterday: Myerson still has the Ballmer-esque presumption that Microsoft controlled its own destiny and could have leveraged its assets (like Office) to win the smartphone market, ignoring that by virtue of being late Windows Phone was a product competing against ecosystems, which meant no consumer demand, which meant no developers, topped off by the arrogance to dictate to OEMs and carriers what they could and could not do to the phone, destroying any chance at leveraging distribution to get critical mass…
Interestingly, though, Myerson’s ridiculous assertion in a roundabout way shows how you change culture…In this case, Nadella effectively shunted Windows to its own division with all of the company’s other non-strategic assets, leaving Myerson and team to come to yesterday’s decision on their own. Remember, Nadella opposed the Nokia acquisition, but instead of simply dropping the axe on day one, thus wasting precious political capital, he let Windows give it their best shot and come to that conclusion on their own.
One wonders what would have happened if they just sort of let Windows be Windows. I.e. if they had continued iterating on core stuff but left UI and general philosophy resembling Win7's trajectory and not tried to force people into WinRT/UWP/store.
Even though Win10 attempted corrective action it always struck me that it was still accepting the fundamental thesis of Win8. They still kept with the Orwellian redefinition of phrases like "Windows app" to mean very recent, immature and unproven technology. They were still talking about ARM devices that don't let you do a straightforward recompile of old code. They were still pushing the Store as the only means to distribute software, where even Apple has not succeeded in changing people's habits on the desktop.
I hope that with a weaker organization, people keeping the lights on for Windows will know to not shake things up too severely and ease up on pushing some of these silly ideas. I somehow doubt it. I've been hoping for that for... 7 years?
With Windows 8 they tried to do too much too quickly and not well, however their motivations and intention were spot on in my opinion. Security has always been a pain point for Windows and it's only been getting worse, the Store introduced a sandbox like that found on iOS and Android. ARM, iOS, and Android showed that modern hardware and software can produce power efficiencies that put x86 and Windows to shame. UWP introduced hardware independence and a modern development framework that would put Windows Apps on a level playing field with iOS and Android.
The problem was that Microsoft thought that merely by virtue of their existence, developers would adopt UWP/Store despite the path forward being a huge pain in the ass. We see how that played out. With Windows 10 we've seen a course correction and a change in strategy. You can have traditional Applications sandboxed in the Store, and you can have UWP Apps outside the Store. Microsoft bought Xamarin and is folding it into UWP, the intent is to not just have hardware independence with UWP but also OS independence.
That’s a bold claim presented without evidence.
IFF your user has enabled side-loading.
will keep my Win7 for as long as hardware and software keeps running. don-t expect much more from OS honestly
Android and iOS have demonstrably shown that most users don't value freedom as long as the OS works for their needs. Most users are security nightmares as IT Admins and relatives supporting family members can attest to. The Store is Microsoft's attempt to introduce that stability and safety to the wider Windows audience.
That's not to say that there isn't a significant subset of power users who want the ability to do what they will with their machine however they are the exception.
Microsoft is struggling with how to cater to both markets simultaneously.
Here's hoping they'll rethink that at some point and follow Apple's approach of having just one desktop OS instead of nickel-and-diming the masses for features such as BitLocker.
- There will be less SKUs
- Updates won't require to restart the OS
Well ...
Presumably, given that the opposite has happened, in that case, "targets" would not have been met by "Q4" and important team members would have to be "let go".
As you point out, this is not new. I would pin the start of this trajectory on the introduction of Windows Activation with XP. It's all variations on the theme of restricting the user's freedom. It hasn't been your software since 2001. It's theirs.
With the possible exception of my non-Retina iPad mini I’d rather watch Netflix on any of my mobile devices. It never even occurred to me to look for it on my laptop, because the form factor is so ridiculous for movie watching.
Now, I have no idea where to even start! C#? C++? .NET? Win32? MFC? WPF? XAML? WinForms? UWP? What a rat’s next! How did MS let the development ecosystem get so muddied? I know I can go online and research all of these, learn the trade offs, and hope I bet on the right horse, but then again I could also choose to simply leave this crazy platform alone and work on more features on the platforms that are more comfortable.
Out (but not gone/forgotten): Win32 (hand-coded C, C++ MFC, C++ ATL and related alphabet soup [aka back in the day the choice wasn't easy, either], VB6, .NET WinForms, etc), WPF/Silverlight (a .NET only XAML platform)
In: UWP (C++ with XAML, C#/.NET with XAML, JS with HTML/CSS)
Just three UI platforms to consider (Win32, WPF, UWP), two of which are mostly deprecated and not recommended if you are building a fresh application or porting one to a new UI. The remaining platform (UWP) gives you language choice (C++, C# or other .NET languages, JS), but not UI design framework/markup language choice (XAML, unless JS and then HTML).
If you are doing a fresh port of a C++ application from another platform, the choice seems pretty simple to target the UWP and use XAML to define your UI.
A fun result of the whole mess is that after a new Windows 10 install, the first thing I do now is open Store to install Ubuntu WSL.
The old Windows desktop might have had a half dozen things prompting you to elevate and update. Flash player, Adobe reader, Java runtime, all these things wanted your undivided attention to update, not to mention were polling the network and using resources to do that. So maybe you could see a single piece of infrastructure allowing those third parties to hook in less intrusively.
But that's not what they asked for. They would prefer you trash your app and write for the thing they came up with this year, to be thrown away when they do the rewrite the next year.
Selling only WinRT software made all their efforts worthless.
Forcing developers to provide Win32 and WinRT versions of software alienated software developers.
Some of the calculation was correct. WinRT was not.
Wasn't old windows desktop technology the one proven to be bad? I mean I can say this because I like windows, but people have made fun of windows bugs and viruses for three decades now..
Granted, Windows Store still sucks ass years later its introduction, but building a new ecosystem with unified and modern tooling was probably a necessary step for them to make
I sometimes wonder if maybe they should have done a hard fork between 7 and 8 and continue to develop 7 for commercial users and 8 would be the consumer version.
In the commercial branch, they could undo some of the moves they made years ago (like putting GDI in the kernel rather than user space) to eventually get a more stable, secure OS.
The thing with "people making fun" through is that a lot of it was by-product of culture war between linux and windows world. between radical ideological open source and closed source - where Microsoft engaged in a lot of ugly tactic. Between techies who wanted tech focused on their needs and commercial company that cared significantly less about needs of admins, tinkerers and such.
Meaning, the jokes were much more political and much less technical. They were often result of people hating Microsoft (recall their ugly tactic).
A lot of that stuff could have been (and is now being) fixed incrementally. Lots of that tech is available to Windows desktop applications without needing to switch to UWP. Some of it is UWP only (except for a backstage pass for Edge, which tells you everything you need to know) only to push developers to the Store.
I feel like MS had mostly quashed these problems with XP - it was certainly not bug-free, but after a few years was a solid enough platform many used it all the way to (and probably past) its EoL in 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
Windows for Pen Computing was released in 1992.
One of the points the article makes is that Ballmer's MS would do things like not release Office for iOS because that would potentially eat into Windows marketshare. That no longer will happen. MS sees its more important to get o365 everywhere they can.
From my perspective, switching small businesses over to Exchange Online and other o365 services - The future is bright for MS in that space. These SMBs we've switched over have gone from using a version of Office they purchased forever ago and an old Exchange license to paying 50-100 a month for Office 365.
Windows is a perfect example of no focus at all. Maybe this makes sense for a true mainstream OS.
To be honest, I wonder if Azure, Exchange online or Office 365 can really be their future. Why not use AWS, Scaleway or a local service. It's cheaper and better.
amazing how many people here are missing the point. this is not about Windows vs MacOS. Client OS has become a commodity with prices approaching 0 (MacOS no longer charges for upgrades, neither does iOS or Android) and users care less about how they get to Facebook.
Think about server/mobile space. if MS tried to hang on to their dominance simply via desktop lock-in (because it worked in the past) that would be their Kodak moment. All Nadela is doing here is emphasizing efforts on staying competitive in cloud/o365 which is where he thinks they can continue to grow and stay competitive and bring in revenues from enterprise clients. Less and less companies want to lease/run their own windows/database servers, and with technologies like containers a lot of companies are now going with open source solutions.
No, established enterprises (both private and government) are, in the real world, important customers for cloud offerings like Azure, GCP, and AWS.
When it comes to "someone else's datacenter", I think you'd be surprised at just how few companies even own a datacenter, let alone their own racks. Even the major clouds lease their own space from actual datacenter builders and operators.
You are incredibly unbelievably wrong here. I work for a vendor known for incredibly high prices and have knowledge of basically the entire infrastructure of every one of my clients, and nearly all of them have a massive cloud strategy that's in-place right now. I even have clients shipping their security and compliance logs to the cloud, or sending them from cloud to cloud.
Actually the more medium-sized businesses are the ones most hesitant to move to the cloud, because of the lack of cloud expertise on their teams. But even then... it's still a huge strategy. They're all consolidating physical datacenters and using Amazon or Azure or Google.
And guess what, the CTO and CFO and COO will very much care about licensing cost of each CPU running windows or sql server, vs FREE on Linux.
If you mean as in a desktop PC then no, but smartphones is becoming more and more important and Apple is not strong outside the US. Around here almost everyone has an Android phone as a work phone and I see more Chromebooks by the day.
I also want to point out that i believe that saying they abandon the ecosystem is missing the point. They don't. They just don't let Windows dictate what the rest of the business does.
There are still a lot of tech heads and gamers that depend on Windows and will continue to buy into the platform. I even know hard core Linux devs who've switched back to Win10 and just work off of the new Linux Subsystem and an X11 server.
With Android being a clusterfuck of vendor specific bloatware and not having a single concept of a clean install, Microsoft should focus on keeping a clean Windows install equivalent to a fresh Mac install.
Everyone hates when Microsoft changes something core and foundational about Windows and thus there has been little change in certain areas of the OS for the last two decades. That build up of cruft has become untenable and Microsoft attempted to address major pain points like the Control Panel with Windows 8, then 8.1, and still in 10. The problem is that rewriting something like the Control Panel would consume 100% of developer resources for an entire OS Dev cycle. Can you imagine if Microsoft announced Windows 11 and the only difference between it and 10 was a new control panel?
Windows 10 is the perfect opportunity to start fixing cruft. It's already controversial but not universally hated, they got the majority of people to adopt it through free upgrades, and they've introduced the semi annual upgrade cycle that allows them to gradually introduce foundational changes gradually. With each release of Windows 10 they introduce a bunch of new crappy apps that are completely forgettable AND they improve a core feature silently.
What's the use case for a "hard core Linux dev" and WSL? I've tried it. It failed miserably for Rails development when it was released. I logged bugs. I went back to what I was doing. Maybe it's gotten good now?
Speaking of Windows OEM bloatware clusterfucks here's your typical Windows HP OEM Windows clusterfuck:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1GyAI5d-Yw&feature=youtu.be...
That Windows we all know, both desktop and server side, is not dead. The economics on the server side are diminishing (20~30 year outlook) and Microsoft won't be around if they don't do something about it now.
IMHO it's a very smart strategy, people just didn't understand what Ben was saying because he didn't articulate it correctly (which I do find with his content, but it's less often the case)
Sticking with something just because it's a large majority is a great way to fail when that something fades into the background.
Can you elaborate this assertion? As far as stability goes, macs are top notch. I'd say in the business context Windows machines are prevalent because of successful MS strategies (in terms of marketing, not ethics) in 1995-2005 era, and it kind of stuck around.
Windows has provisions for performing all sorts of tasks across a fleet of desktops. I can automate deployment of a Windows desktop to the point where all you have to do is boot it up and join it to the domain (which makes it easier to hire someone to do it as well).
What's more is that these settings will work across updates. I've gotten really sick of the screwy changes Apple makes to macOS with little warning. Windows goes to great lengths to ensure backwards compatibility between major version upgrades. (For example, did you know VB6 apps still run just fine?) Also, I can get fine grained control of updates to Windows.
But maybe most importantly, I can virtualize Windows and create a virtual desktop environment. Now I can hand out toasters to users and they can just log in to their box from anywhere.
Windows is simply much better at making desktop units fungible.
My MBP and its periodic gray screen of death begs to differ. Apple really needs to shore up its QA.
I suspect it's a mere marketing strategy to jack up their stock price and gain a "cool factor". MS will go wherever the market/profits leads them.
Their cloud is commercially successful, a rarity for new MS products actually, and that's where they currently see future growth. But if Windows stays a nice cash cow, they'll quietly milk it.
"Productivity" applications still need a real GUI, something the Web has yet to do right cross-browser: CSS/JS/DOM is a mess. I believe we need a WYSIWYG standard to get GUI's right. The server side can still scale the window & widgets per device size under WYSIWYG, so it's a myth that WYSIWYG is anti-mobile. The client-side auto-flow approach sucks for efficient UI's.
They aren't abandoning the desktop Windows ecosystem, they’ve just demoted Windows from a single desktop and server org that the rest of the firm orbits to something that serves the areas where there actually is expected to be growth.
I'm not a huge fan of using my tablet or phone for things. I almost always prefer using a "real" operating system. I know that puts me in the minority to an extent, but I'm not the only one. The problem is, neither major desktop OS is moving in a direction I like. I guess I'm just getting old and cranky.
This morning I noticed I have a 3D Objects folder pinned to the This PC item that I can't remove. I also have Mixed Reality Portal and Mixed Reality Viewer that I can't remove.
Why on earth are those apps part of the default install? Worse though - why doesn't Microsoft make it easy to uninstall them? I don't want their crappy news, weather, contacts, maps, music, and other default apps. They should make the apps so good users want them, not force install them and make them uninstallable.
In the same vein, I don't know what they intent to mean by their AI division (esp as a platform, service, whatever) and probably neither do they, but hey, you got to make the speech of the boss somehow vaguely believable, even if the whole earth know it is just for show.
In all honesty that's been my impression of Windows since its inception. The only time I can recall ever feeling like Windows was deserved market leader was with Windows 2000: Linux wasn't mature on the desktop, OS X wasn't yet released or literally only just released and OS 9 was god awful (worse than the Win 95 in my opinion). The only platform that really competed in technical merit was BeOS and we all know how that ended up.
Win 3.x felt like a huge step backwards from what Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Windows 9x was an improvement but slow and buggy. Windows XP took a long time to mature - years and two service packs in fact. And before then it was basically just a slower (bar start up time), uglier version of Win 2000. And by the time Microsoft recovered from the cluster fuck of Longhorn OS X and Linux were both streets ahead in terms of stability, usability and even just basic features.
There are obviously people who genuinely warm to Windows and prefer that as a platform - good for them; variety is the spice of life and all - but from a technical standpoint Windows has always felt like it's had a multitude of low hanging fruit which aren't trendy enough for Redmond to invest development time in (case in point: why did it take until Windows 10 before shortcut keys were added to cmd.exe? And then why did MS stop there? The terminal emulator still totally sucks compared to nearly every other ever made!)
So, interns work on 'old' stuff (like office apps, Windows, tools). And they always look pretty rough.
For the last year I ran a x200 (c2d p8400, passmark 1458) + below average ssd. Win10, almost no cruft, some cortana disabled etc.
It's ok but became worse and worse (regular pointer lag for a minute, pointer lag is very very sad and indicates very low level perf issues)
I don't use full fledged linux Desktops, if at all. I run a bare i3wm + emacs + $browser + mpv setup.
Last week I booted my old x61 (c2d l7500, passmark 967) on old intel 80GB SSD linux machine. I was stunned ..
chromium and firefox are seriously more reactive. They're only slower for graphics/video/intense workloads. emacs and git flies. Everything is tiny and leaner. Even on an older, slower cpu.
It's even mentally easier since I have less things to handle under linux (still too much to my tastes, but windows has so many components and moving pieces..)
I have to run that archlinux/i3wm setup on the x200 to get more data.
With the open source AMD drivers.
I highly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone just starting out.
There's small UI affordances I miss, there's no MS Office (which is becoming less of a problem for sure), Spotify is iffy, etc etc. So many small things that add up.
Finally - Windows Susbsytem for Linux, or whatever it's called, has really made CLI work on Windows painless. With oh my zsh and CMDer I can do just about everything I can on my Ubuntu machines. Even though Windows 10 or MacOS aren't perfect, the pain isn't quite great enough for me to seriously make a change.
The problem is that when you hit one of these issues it's infuriating and often costs a lot of time. It also has a way of happening when you really don't want it to, since when you're traveling or in a hurry you're more likely to be doing "different" things with your machine and thus are more likely to hit a problem. Linux desktops are like a car that runs great for your daily commute but blows up on road trips.
IMHO the reason for this is that the remaining 5-10% of the polish that's required to reach excellence in software often takes >50% of the time and is by far the least fun part of programming. As a result people generally have to be paid to do it. Free software rarely does unless it's heavily sponsored or incubated in-house by someone with resources.
This is why I still like Mac. I think Apple as a company is a little past its prime but Mac still offers by far the most reliable and consistently productive desktop experience. Windows has improved but they've decided to encrust it with advertising. Ads in a paid app or OS are a total deal breaker. Windows also still has more edge case issues than Mac, mostly due to driver issues.
Linux on the desktop has always been a niche experience for a niche audience. ChromeOS and Android (both based on Linux) are mainstream desktop experiences, as are MacOS, iOS, and Windows.
(I exclusively used Linux on the desktop from 1995 until I bought my first Mac in 2002).
An OS should be stagnant. Its job is to get out of the way as soon as possible, not to constantly wow its users with cool stuff. Any user-facing change will break existing workflows and force people to learn new habits.
Change is bad. That goes for every piece of software, from OSes to web browsers to libraries. Stagnation should be your goal.
Microsoft can't do things properly. Without constant pointless novelty they couldn't convince people to buy a new version every few years. That business model has made them a lot of money, but making money and making good software are nearly orthogonal goals.
EDIT: Maybe I've misunderstood you. It sounds like you're talking about bugfixes, which certainly something Microsoft should work on.
I still don't understand how anybody gets any real work done on a smartphone.
Has work suddenly gotten so simplistic that most people really don't need a keyboard? They're dragging and tapping and writing IM-like sentence fragments riddled with autocorrect typos? And this is acceptable? Seriously?
Microsoft should have recognized that, recognized they were late to the party, just let Google & Apple have it, and instead focus on integrating with their products and doubling down on the "home & professional computer" segment they already lead in. But they were late to that as well because of Ballmer's mistake, which gave Apple the in to position the iPad as an up-and-coming product in this segment.
This is demonstrably wrong. The home computer market isn't even a market that exists in many parts of the world. To see that phones can supplant the home computer market almost entirely in Africa and India and say it has no effect here is crazy.
You can already watch it happen. Will people need a computer to do long form typing? Maybe, although for many a tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard will suffice.
Will an average family of 4-5 need more than one though? Will many people just get by sharing a laptop one family member got from work, or an old clunker they use just to edit essays for school? Absolutely.
Will smartphones and tablets kill home computers? No, not for a long time. Will they pretty much cap any growth in that market, and turn them into trucks when they were formerly cars? Without a doubt.
"Management" needs email + spreadsheet, spreadsheets are not good enough on phone screen, but on tablet I think those would do. Just like reading code files with a lot of lines.
I think most of the work is thinking about meat and core of the problem. Writing it down with typos or not is not a problem. You do not write corporate communication statement that will go to millions of customers every day. I do not mind getting email from coworker with typos. When I ask my boss about 5 mins conversation I am not going to write "Dear sir or madam can I have 5 minutes of your time. Sincerly, O.". More like "Hi, Can we talk for 5 mins?". Work is not simplistic writing it down or improving later depends on context. You have great idea and phone, write it down, if you have to show it to millions of customers, then at least 2 other people have to read it anyway.
Businesses that started before the advent of cloud software will continue to use QuickBooks because that's what the owners know, and why fix something that isn't broken? But newer businesses that started in the last few years will be much more likely to use cloud software because it's so much more convenient.
One of the accountants I know considers herself computer savvy (she's not, but that's a different topic) and she's pretty young (30s) and she insisted I build her a server for her business to run Quickbooks off of. She won't trust a cloud solution, or even a remotely hosted server. Some of this fear seems to be based on the seminars she goes to which are either held by or attended by FBI special agents. They are pretty good at telling you all the ways you may be hacked, and precious little practical advice on how to avoid that while staying sane.
The work that you need to do in order to unwind from legacy Windows stuff like fat apps, IE-optimized websites, and legacy Office-based workflows makes it pretty easy to move to an iPad to Google, etc. The only thing that Microsoft has going for them is that every other vendor is also fucking up client computing in different ways.
I haven't seen any issues with apps though, so I have to dispute this claim. We just moved 5,000 employees from Windows 7 to 10, and it went far smoother than anyone really expected - everything just works. It's a wide range of apps too, everything from in-house WPF apps to CAD and engineering software.
IE11 support will go away at some point. Many of those apps are now being updated to work on Chrome -- I know of a few large shops that aren't testing IE or Edge anymore for internal apps!
I do agree that they did a heroic effort on making the update process incredibly reliable. Most non-prehistoric applications transition seamlessly.
Note that I personally equate Windows 10 and the subscription "Office 365 ProPlus". The layers of complexity are astounding. I present to you what I call the "Office 365 ProPlus Build Decoder Ring" - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Version-and-build-n...
Windows 10 itself has about 8-10 releases that an enterprise needs to think about. Transition from release to release has gotchas and additional Windows-Office gotchas. (For example, the way Office authenticates changes in certain builds) (See: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows-10/release-inf...)
Tablets are rapidly taking over the market for cash registers.
Or the restaurants or cocktail bars that happen to have tablets instead of paper menus.
They started with iPads, but as their chains got bigger they moved to a mix of Android and W10 tablets.
Source, personal anecdote getting out of the menu app into the OS.
Or as alternative go to a local games developer meeting group.
There were plenty of them in San Jose at GDC, from what was shown on the live streams.
Get rid of CAL's. Charge a fixed price for a certain # of simultaneously running Windows instances, no matter how you run it. Even charging an ongoing subscription for this would be acceptable. Simplify the licensing situation for SMBs wanting to run an on-premise redundant systems, without needing diagrams to explain the difference between running, standby, CAL's, virtualization, etc.
If you're developing software for a platform, trying to figure out how to optimally license that platform should be the least of your concerns, so you can focus on your product.
any major players? entire healthcare industry is married to microsoft, at least the big names. same for lots of major enterprises that i know of
I evaluated a bunch of other products, like QuickBooks, Curdbee, etc. but always ended up coming back to FreshBooks and have been with them consistently since about 2010.
Their customer support team is also great. I've only had one or two issues with the system, but in each case, they were quick to respond and help me resolve the issue.
The hardest part of running a small business for me is collecting money from customers, and FreshBooks makes that easy. FreshBooks allows me to connect with my customers in ways I wasn't able to before and it has reduced the process of billing to just a few clicks I have to do once a week; allowing me to focus on the services I provide instead of data entry and invoice tracking.
I hope that helps.
- windows domains - group policy - roaming profiles - drivers written for in-house equipment, ranging from machining to mass spectrometry, done over decades, and basically compatible back to NT 4, until M$ screws everything up...
They just don't know where their bread is buttered, and their bean counting practices are evidently obscuring it, as they keep doing stupid crap decisions like Office365.
They should stabilize and streamline what they already built...
Their continued dominance in business is contingent on them preparing their products for the next wave of workers. The generation that grew up typing papers out on their phones is going to have a different expectation of what productivity means. They’re going to have to scramble to meet it. Since Salesforce is not so quietly buying a modern productivity portfolio to take it from them.
Without the "we need to dominate the market and be everywhere" people pushing devs to implement feature nobody wants and have to deactivate anyways, Windows will get better for the people that love (and need) to use it.
The article itself implies the same. It's very clearly a case of putting the cart before the hearse.
This should be good for Windows as it will focus on what it's good for.. being the base system for drivers, windowing, app launching, etc. While the services/cloud gets decoupled from it allowing more flexibility for their developers/programs to work across multiple platforms.
Similarly, this just marks the maturity level of Windows, where there really is no significant innovation in operating systems release after release. Nothing like win 3.1 -> win 95 etc. Its been that way for a while. Obviously its cash that motives this move from Microsoft, however I wouldn't want Microsoft changing the location of the start menu every release just to stir up the market and justify a release (for example) every year.
I remember a cherished time where the next operating system release felt like an upgrade to myself as well as my PC. I could do more than before. No longer. We have it all nowadays and have became spoilt.
"The End of Windows" = "The End of Windows as the core foundation of the various Microsoft divisions/services/apps"
It does not mean the end of Windows as an important part of Microsoft...at all.
Rather it's about decoupling Windows from the rest of the other divisions to reflect the reality of today's non-PC centric world where Window's is merely one client among other mobile/cloud/AI/IoT/etc clients.
As others have pointed out, the perfect example is how Ballmer didn't want to release Office for iPad until Windows had a touch screen version to compete with it. It means more flexibility for both the company and for Windows, which is win-win for Microsoft consumers and Windows users.
Headlines like that make some people less likely to actually read the article, especially on HN.
You're going to need to convince your channel partners this is a thing that has to happen, and you're going to expect a revolt because so many tertiary industries are contingent upon Windows and its licenses. The tear-down for everything from the Windows app-store to the ballmer-era brick and mortar "windows store" is going to be significant. There are also laboratories, power plants, hospitals, and prisons that all rely heavily on Windows, so expect to be on the hook from state level government for quite a while...the "end" of windows also confirms the wastefully squandered effort to get Germany to obsolete its massive and very functional Linux deployment.
You'll also need to have a substantive marketshare in, say, cloud in order to start deprecating Windows. Outside of Redmonds own inflated reporting, Azure isnt exactly a competitor. Most devs would rather walk off a cliff than learn a new API --one that only Microsoft uses-- for cloud that is not EC2 compatible in any way. Conversely there are more than 40 providers of cloud services that all managed an EC2 api for objects.
Windows isn't going anywhere, and they're accepting the reality that it might just be a "portal" into web technology in a similar vein to Chromebooks. This is a reality Apple refuses to accept, for better or worse. But, Windows still comes with those massively powerful internals that enable more powerful professional experiences for the users that need them.
This is, really, the only platform in the world that champions both. MacOS obviously has those powerful foundations and can run webapps natively, but its not something christened by Apple. iOS is the same way, but with less powerful foundations. ChromeOS? Android? Linux Desktop? They're not even considerations in this world.
Then you consider the massive success of their Xbox and Azure divisions, and I think anyone who bets against Microsoft right now isn't doing it cogently. They have a lot of legacy and Ballmer's strategic mistakes to get right, but I legitimately think they'll come out of the next 5 years in a better financial position than Google.
I'd honestly love for more portions of Windows to become open source and slowly work up to the full repository. I think there would be an immediate influx of 0days as people find holes but I would hope they would close quickly. It's still a very big gamble to let go of something you've literally built your foundation on but I do hope that instead of Windows silently going into oblivion that they'll open it up for the masses, even if they would no longer have the resources to support it. I feel like someone or company would step up.
Having said all that, I'm going on 4 years in mostly macOS. The missteps in High Sierra are pretty abysmal but not the end of the world. I hope Apple really changes their processes to keep the OS stable but I see this downward trend in just about all PC-like operating systems. It's like everyone sees the end of the line coming and they're just half assing every move they make. I think Meltdown/Spectre was a major blow that has probably single handedly slowed all momentum to a standstill. Granted my sample size is very small but I really hope I'm just looking at this big lull right before an evolution/revolution.
This interleaving strategy was okay when they were the only market player, but now that there's actually good competition in the computing space (read: smartphones and chromebooks), it's not so good. All of the little sacrifices that Windows has to make to move itself forward are cuts that make people reconsider using it in the first place.
I honestly wonder what world it would be if every Windows release had "stuck the landing." If we had a super solid Vista and a super solid Windows 8, would Microsoft even be in remotely the same position as they are now? Probably not, because it would actually have been the preferred choice, and not just the default.
She just doesn't understand what is happening anymore, and how to exit this mode which she never asked for. What helps here is that all those apps are absolutely useless.
It's a disaster disaster disaster.
It's a bit of a reach to say this, but it's a little bit similar to McDonald's selling toys with meals to entice children.
If you meant a specific game to run, well then you need to weight your pros and cons and stop whining when you make your decision.
Alternatively, dual boot.
GP is the one who said he'd move to linux if there were games. I didn't imply he was wrong for using Windows. I think you (and all other siblings) are reading more into my comment than there actually is.
Last time I tried it a few years ago, it was ~10fps on linux, and a solid 100+fps on windows.
Amateur tech punditry at its finest.
While I'm not exactly a fan of Microsoft, there is nothing I dread more than a closed platform controlled by a single company, and Google is moving more and more aggressively in that direction. There is now a whole industry dedicated to installing hacked Google products on devices Google does not approve of.
>There is now a whole industry dedicated to installing hacked Google products on devices Google does not approve of.
I think you meant to say there was until Google closed that loophole.
Microsoft should just accept that they sell a commercial product for businesses and make a good solid product that needs little attention and gets the job done. Like Mack trucks.
But yeah, the overall point still stands. If you have a particular game that you don't feel like you can substitute and it's not available on a platform that you'd like to switch to, you're probably not switching to that platform.
Microsoft has not really been in hardware space before (except consoles, otherwise it was mostly accessories). I believe they jumped to laptops, tablets and desktops to have full control of the user experience.
Microsoft started building mice because they wanted to add a wheel to them to make working in Office applications better.
Microsoft started building 2-in-1 tablet laptops (Surface) because they'd been calling it the future for a decade and no one was paying attention.
For the most part Microsoft's hardware strategy is at its best in "if you build it, they will come (and copy it as soon as they understand why you built it)" mode.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/08/apple-will-show-off-its-move...
https://stratechery.com/2017/apple-and-the-oak-tree/
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/03/22/apple-services-revenue-...
(edited to fix a typo)
Never again will one app be compatible with others without a business agreement between them ... because that just can't be allowed (dixit $100 million per year+ managers at these huge companies, and I'm sure it's 100% coincidence that this would allow small companies to compete with them. Totally unrelated to this decision). Can't work in the cloud, can't work on android, can't work on IOS. And for that matter, can't work on UWP.
And of course let's not forget that the massive cost, that everyone's data is now 100% accessible to law enforcement and civil courts (and thus to anyone with the money to sue you) is just acceptable damage. After all, that doesn't affect $100 billion plus companies much at all.
Their argument is that it can make web banking unsafe. Yes ... that's true. It can.
What is does 99.999% of the time however is enforce the market dominance of really large players.
But, like people walking into a camp during WWII, nobody holds a moment of silence when they enter the compound with the large barbed wire. Nobody regrets what's happening when they lock the gate. Only years later, when all the bodies are found ... then we stop and think.
This is them locking the gate. Now comes years and years of really really bad applications, and exploiting the lockin.
And yes, the only system not in a locked ecosystem is the PC ecosystem (needless to say, this is the ecosystem that ALL of these large companies use, MS, Google and Apple, for themselves. And now they're locking it for the rest of us)
"Today, I’m announcing the formation of two new engineering teams"
"Windows: Joe Belfiore will continue leading our Windows experiences and will drive Windows innovation in partnership with the PC and device ecosystem"
How does this exactly means they are giving up on Windows ?! Seriously, wishful thinking much ?
I know it's not the same market circumstances but this feels alot like the decision to stop development of ie6 after Microsoft beat Netscape.
I think this article better explains things http://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-and-why-microsoft-is-...
Between it's spyware and its tendency to just do things without telling you, without giving you an easy way to stop, it is just not something that feels comfortable enough to use anymore for power users.
It feels like whatever I gain in convience, is lost when trying to figure out what windows is doing with all that CPU/RAM/Network usage or how to disable some new service that I have 0 interest in.
If you’re not using the PC, can we have it back?
— General Purpose Computing
The forces against general purpose computing are to be found on 1 infinite loop and 1600 Amphitheatre parkway.
The modern version is trying to copy closed ecosystems, instead of building on historical strengths in stable APIs, backward compatibility, diverse hardware and ISV licensing models.
Microsoft missed the mobile revolution in just about every way they could have, so now they have to make a number of forced moves.
Some good exceptions exists (HTML5 and AV1), but many things are as bad as they were for a long time (Outlook, DirectX and etc.).
1. The "home" computer boom: ZX Spectrums, Acorn, Commodore, Atari with maybe an Apple II or a CPM machines for more serious use. 2. The Atari ST or Amiga wave. WIMP and productivity software as well as gaming and content creation 3. At this point I did switch to Windows but I could just have easily switched to Mac. Apple didn't cease to be a force at any stage. They maintained a strong base in home use and content creation only losing the enterprise.
In our alternate history there was also room for Next or BeOS. You never know.
Now what MS/IBM did enable (accidentally to some degree) was an open hardware platform. However if they weren't around then other players might have stepped in. Maybe CP/M succeeded in going 16bit, GEM might have caught on or the Apple clones might have found a way to legally survive.
On final reading I realise you might have meant "PC" in the narrow sense. If so then you're correct in a trivial sense. If not then I disagree.
That also makes me well aware of how much a fully decked out computer cost before IBM released a hardware spec that allowed companies to compete and the vast economies of scale this involved brought prices down to where mere mortals like myself could afford very powerful machines. Unlike the various 8 bit offerings of the time, which were relatively expensive for the computing power and storage options they provided.
Even though the initial PCs were expensive and anemic and did not even have the same capacities as many other machines aimed at the home market of the time it had staying power because of IBM's formidable manufacturing and marketing capabilities and Microsoft made it useful enough that non-technical users would dare to make the jump. Tandy/Radio Shack tried - and to some extent succeeded - to do this too with their TRS-80 models. Competition by the clone builders then did the rest.
So I'm sure there would have been a 'computing scene' without Microsoft and IBM, and it likely would have been an interesting one. But the machine under my desk would likely not have existed in that world, other than maybe as manufactured by DEC, Apollo, SGI or some other player of those days and it would have been marketed as a scientific workstation and cost North of $10K instead of 10% of that.
General purpose computing for the masses rode in on the back of economies of scale that IBM and Microsoft enabled.
(And trust me on this: I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan but that bit they did actually made the world a better place.)
They almost went bankrupt around 1994.
If it wasn't for Microsoft money and the merge with NeXT bringing Jobs back, they would have been gone.
Up to iPod's success Apple was meaningless pretty much everywhere outside US.
Now that you mention it, I kind of wonder what would have happened if Steve Jobs had never left Apple in the first place.
Can you clarify that statement? My memory of computing history include other types of personal computers during and around that time.
The economies of scale engendered by the standardization of the PC platform really made things move.
Which lock down version of Apple or Google systems do you prefer?
-- Microsoft
Sure, install Linux and feel free.
it's more likely that some other player just releases a completely new OS to replace Windows. just like Chrome replaced IE (and not Firefox).
Exactly.