Hacker News Reader

Comment by justaaron | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is squandering the decades of work humans put into drivers, an OS codebase that is unique and omnipresent, and if they can't see how useless and crap all their other services are without the conceptual core that powered their rise to sucess, then they will die.

- 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...

View on HN

If they play their cards right, this will actually strengthen that part of the universe. Windows was led by people who wanted it to be a consumer operating system in every home. That lead them to do a bunch of stuff that was nonsensical to the business world (Win8 start screen on Windows Server? Seriously?) This move makes Windows subservient to people who actually understand those users.

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.

It's not the end of Windows. The title of the article is a bit click bait-y.

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 title of the article is a bit click bait-y.

The article itself implies the same. It's very clearly a case of putting the cart before the hearse.

I don't see anywhere in the article where Windows is going away or no longer being invested in... if anything it's going to get more focused on in terms of a pure client OS perspective than some mixed bag of services + built-in apps + OS.

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.

Everything that has drivers for Windows now has better drivers for Linux. I've plugged in 4x12m cnc machines that just worked out of the box. We did it for shits and giggles to see how bad it would screw up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com