Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want

I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world.

Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.

All of that makes sense from a user perspective, but why take 30% of a wide base of consumers and businesses when you can take 100% from the most profitable ones?

They want to sell you an Office365 subscription for each user, whose computing needs are provided by a remote desktop served on Azure compute, which you access from a Surface device, where your business information is stored and accessed through databases on their servers and software they provide. They want your enterprise identity to be managed through their offering, and your warehouse automation microservices to run on their k8s platform.

Their consumer play is looking more and more like it's Xbox focused, and some personal software interoperability with their enterprise offering. The consumer OS layer is less important now they missed mobile - they get end consumers by selling the cloud [0] to the business who sell to them, not providing the shopfront to the end user.

The model they're moving towards is that the "desktop" is largely going to go. You want some software? Here's a dumb terminal and a burst of virtual CPU from the cloud to run it for the 45 minutes you need. "Installing" things (from an end user perspective) is going to seem old hat within many of our working lives.

That being said, am sure a shopfront will emerge at some point, but for cloud based software, not for installable onto an OS software. That only really comes after this whole transition is complete though.

[0] and "cloud" in this context not being commodity access, but the vertical software integration to go with it.

We're just seeing the next swing of the eternal localised-centralised pendulum. At some point, it will swing back, as people realise that handing control of things they depend on over to centralised organisations that will naturally tend to act in their own interests isn't necessary or desirable, and as businesses realise that a lot of the claimed advantages of cloud computing are overstated or entirely illusory. There are some clear advantages to everyone being connected online, but it's not necessary (from a technical perspective) for everyone to follow the models that have become popular so far in order to enjoy those advantages.

The question is when that will happen, because obviously the powerful interests running Big Software are almost all heavily invested in promoting the cloud model for now since they're the ones most able to benefit from it. It wouldn't surprise me if the effective opposition eventually comes from some sort of grass roots movement towards open hardware and open software, even if it takes a decade or more, rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame. It's just a shame about all the billions we're going to waste due to lost productivity and security/privacy problems with the dumbed down software and corporate exploitation that will be the norm for IT in the meantime. :-(

> It wouldn't surprise me if the effective opposition eventually comes from some sort of grass roots movement towards open hardware and open software

Would be nice to see, however I see it coming more from one of the major players screwing up - whether a large scale hack, huge amounts of downtime or a verrrry public issue migrating a high value customer, regulatory break up, or pushing prices just too high.

For a large amount of users of Microsoft's products in enterprises, local government, even SMBs, the experience will likely be better though. "Dumbed down" software is a feature, not a bug. Usage based renting is a preference, compared to large scale IT capex.

I'm just waiting for the O365 + Surface subscriptions to start (unless I've missed it and they have already?). Hardware, software and services for one monthly payment. They're already doing something similar for Xbox and the Game Pass in some markets I believe.

> rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame

They'll go where the money takes them. If the market starts moving, they'll undoubtedly stick their toes in the water. If the current picks up, they'll look to turn the ship to go along with it.

All of the above being said, it still I think reinforces the point that Microsoft's shift from boxed software to services is superbly well done. Whether or not we want that as our future, they've handled the shift toward the current vision of the future well.

Would be nice to see, however I see it coming more from one of the major players screwing up - whether a large scale hack, huge amounts of downtime or a verrrry public issue migrating a high value customer, regulatory break up, or pushing prices just too high.

I would really like to agree with that, but no matter how much they screw up, it won't matter if there isn't a viable alternative strategy anyway. With basically all of Big Tech pushing the same way right now, I think the momentum is too much for any of those things to cause a significant change in direction in the near future.

We've already seen some pretty horrendous failures in terms of reliability, privacy and security. Some of them have come from some very big names. And yet so far I see little if any consequence, other than perhaps some regulatory slaps on the wrist. The big customers paying the big bills are still paying, because what choice do they have? It doesn't gain them much to migrate to a competitor that is still pushing in the same basic direction and vulnerable to the same basic threats, and migrations of key software at corporate scale are financially expensive and have timescales measured in years so there's a big incentive to accept the devil you know.

All of the above being said, it still I think reinforces the point that Microsoft's shift from boxed software to services is superbly well done. Whether or not we want that as our future, they've handled the shift toward the current vision of the future well.

Indeed. As I wrote in another comment, it's tough to argue with success. It's unfortunate that Microsoft's success here doesn't necessarily correlate positively with a better experience for the users of Microsoft software, and the lack of competition for the desktop market is going to leave a lot of people and businesses vulnerable to whatever Microsoft decides is best for Microsoft over the next few years.

Of the possible big events you mentioned, I suspect that means regulatory break-up in an attempt to rejuvenate effective competition in the market is the most promising. But I still wouldn't bet on that happening faster than a grass roots effort powered by the kinds of people who believe in things like rights to repair and meaningful online privacy, and who enjoy writing their own software or experimenting with things like 3D printers and Raspberry Pis. A young generation might take a different view of programming and hobbyist hardware than those 20 or 40 years older who have perhaps become too accepting of the way things are. They might be driven by not wanting to feel trapped by big businesses they think aren't acting in their best interests, or perhaps other concerns about longevity and adaptability driven by positive motivations from outside of pure tech fields, such as protecting the environment. Given the right figurehead(s) to lead a movement, I could believe that might actually happen, but probably over the next decade or two more than the next year or two.

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