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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of “why not” but no actual “why”. Microsoft loses strategic platform control and gains: ...

crickets

While desktop platform control is important and probably has a positive ROI, the article argues that desktop OSs are already "good enough", and that Microsoft can probably find more profitable alternatives for their engineering effort.

This is the same motive behind the switch to Chromium, that browsers are "good enough" and that the marginal gains of platform independence aren't worth the heavy investment.

I get a little uncomfortable when people talk about "engineering effort" like it's just some sort of power stream you can just repoint, because to me it belies a lack of understanding of what programmers do and the challenges they face. (I'm not accusing you personally of that, just that's what pops in mind when people talk about refocusing engineers. I always hear inexperienced project managers talk about having engineers "swarm" a problem, which is a dead giveaway that they're extremely naive). You can't just take a bunch of kernel devs and all the sudden have them work on sharepoint or web frontends or something. Not just from an experience standpoint but a lot of them wouldn't want to do it. Really "refocusing" tends to involve layoffs and rehiring.

I honestly don't think Microsoft cares about the Windows Desktop platform anymore. Certainly their actions regarding Windows 10 don't suggest that they do.

My bet is that if they release a Linux distro, it will be Microsoft's take on ChromeOS, tied to Azure and Office 365 and all that, with any other stuff shunted off somewhere in a container or VM. Oh, you can install your own software from other sources at will, you'll just have to compile it yourself or rely on a network of repos and maintainers. It'll be the death of everything I actually like about computing and I'm not looking forward to it.

One argument the article made is Microsoft is spending billions on Windows while the revenue from, and quality of, Windows are declining.

Quality of Windows userland declined. Windows kernel peaked at 2011 and has been at the peak since then.

> but no actual “why”

Because in every other aspect but the very kernel (and the UI perhaps) Windows is a disaster. Windows Update especially.

So how does replacing the kernel help with that?

It doesn't. Replacing the kernel doesn't but deprecating the entire OS and switching to GNU/Linux + Wine (which means MS would start contributing to Wine) does. If this happens we can get heavily improved Wine + vendors like Adobe releasing Linux-native versions of their apps.

I still don't get it. There's nothing wrong with the kernel, the crap is stuff that they've put on top of the kernel just like it is in Linux. You're giving up the best part of the OS and replacing the worst part with a compatibility layer, why not keep the NT kernel and use a compatibility layer? Since MS has all the code and it wouldn't have to be open source, that'd be much easier.

> just like it is in Linux.

Quite the opposite: the only thing that is (hell arguable, of course) wrong with Linux is its kernel architecture.

I could not possibly disagree more strongly. Linux's kernel has some problems but it is mostly ok. Userspace is where everything has gone horribly horribly wrong in Linux.

E.g. what? As for the kernel I personally dislike the the Linux kernel-driver separation model (I believe these should better be made more separate, like in Windows) but other people (kernel hackers probably) have mentioned the VMS genes in the NT kernel make it in interesting in more ways. But what's wrong with the GNU/Linux userspace? I can't name a single problem with it.

Arguably windows was much more of a disaster 10+ and 20+ years ago in the XP and 95 eras. I have trouble seeing microsoft give up something they've invested 30ish years on without a really obvious reason.

At least it didn't spend hours on applying mandatory updates just to stop working completely in the XP and 95 eras. When I was using Windows XP I ran Windows Update once in some months and everything worked perfectly.

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