Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com