I'm having trouble calibrating my view of Microsoft in recent years, partly because of a story I heard a while ago. I'd be grateful if someone could give me a reality check on this:
Some years back, one criticism I heard against Microsoft was that they threatened to assert patent infringement against Linux, but refused to tell the alleged offenders which particular patents Microsoft considered to be violated. And the end result was Microsoft (imho) legally extorting some Linux vendors for licensing fees.
If that story is true, then is Microsoft still engaging in that behavior or similar?
They did that and more. For instance, to bankroll the SCO lawsuits. I'll never forgive them for any of this, as far as I'm concerned they are untouchable, I don't care whether they 'changed course', if a company has condoned such tactics then they no longer deserve my support.
Companies change more than people do. Am I supposed to trust Google blindly with all my data now because they used to say they wouldn't be evil? Am I supposed to continue trusting boeing because they used to be an engineering driven culture, while ignoring the fact that there are different people in charge now?
all publicly traded companies are amoral and they don't rehabilitate like a person might. Microsoft is simply following the money, they haven't changed, and neither has google really. the behaviour may have changed, but it makes no sense to attribute it in the same way you would to a person
It’s not that companies are amoral in a negative sense, but that you shouldn’t anthropomorphize them. All companies are there to make a profit, some might have a business model that is in line with your personal moral benchmarks, but just that it’s a business model.
Both public and private companies can have business models that are driven by the morality of their founders and key employees but it’s still a business model.
Cygnus wasn’t more moral than say Oracle, they just had developed a business model around FOSS services that was unique, since they didn’t held any IP they didn’t had the tools that some people may consider immoral such as protecting their patents through law suits or worse rent seeking based on IP they hold.
Same goes for other companies today that primarily rely on FOSS software I don’t consider Ubuntu, Red Hat (even before the acquisition) or even Purism to be “moral” companies just because they can’t or don’t hammer someone with law suits or rake in royalties.
I also don’t consider opposition to companies that do to be a simple moral issue. I can and do have my own opinions about companies that I feel practice more rent seeking than actual innovation or any sort of productive activity but I don’t see it to be a particularly moral stance to want them to go into financial trouble because in the end the losers will be their employees and shareholders.
I much rather see companies like Oracle for example be successful based on true productivity than go into financial trouble.
> It’s not that companies are amoral in a negative sense, but that you shouldn’t anthropomorphize them.
But companies are run by people. I think it's easier to think that companies are more like profit robots to get past our qualms of what we expect of humans, but in the end they are made of and run by humans. So much ink of US history has been used to write about corporate scandals and the profiteering that we just come to expect it -- notably the 2008 recession was caused by pure unadulterated greed on a vast scale.
JPMC plead guilty to three felonies and basically got a handslap. Talk about moral hazard!
The thing I find interesting, is that part of what makes up the deterrence of a felony is the loss of representation in the political system, yet, corporations aren't hamstrung by that at all. They don't get a proper vote in the system, yet their lobbyists still get a say when it comes to regulatory proceedings.
Until we can actually deprive bad acting companies of the ability to influence the political landscape, nothing is going to stand a significant chance of actually making a misalignment of moral/legal compass hurt.
People do amoral stuff all the time, even those who claim they have high morals.
What most morals are is boils down to what behavior is acceptable and beneficial or to be more exact the set of incentives and repercussions that society enforces.
No one can really argue that downloading a movie or a songs is an objectively moral act, however most people can easily justify it as a victimless crime, some even justify it by claiming that the entertainment industry itself is immoral.
What you essentially have is people with targets and an incentive structure that is misaligned with what you or society at large consider to be moral.
If a business can make a large sum of money by doing something against the rules and the punishment is smaller than the profits it will essentially always lead to “amoral” behavior.
The way i read your comment, I think I have identified a bit of confusion at least in the words with which you have expressed your comment:
You are distinguishing between Microsoft the corporation and persons who might rehabilitate, although how I read your sentence, I infer that you consider Microsoft a person, only a different kind of person to human beings.
I don't know if I'm right about how I read you, but I think I can comment usefully on a different distinction which I think is the most important one necessary to make in these kinds of comparisons:
A company is a legal person.
But it is unhelpful to think about a corporate person in terms with which you might regard a human being.
I find it very much clearer to think about the body corporate as taking on the character and nature bestowed upon it by its directing executive management / board.
Certainly it is by this means that any company has ever acquired a psychopathy.
AS several comments also say in different ways, the caveat is that once you replace the human animus that directs the behaviour of the company, you can completely change the behaviour of a corporate being.
What I think is being conflated here frequently is the organisational behavioural properties of any large organisations that have vestigial and inhibiting effect on corporate body character redefining changes.
These things are always something that I have to carefully unpick whenever you want to avoid confusing myself and that's after 35 years of analysing corporate beings looking for long term bets. It's not easy or at least it never got easier for me. I wish I could weigh in on the issue which I think everyone cares about most : the sincerity of Microsoft and even the question of whether Microsoft is capable of sincerity. So far I can only agree with a tangential comment made last week, how the old evil Microsoft at least sure documented everything far better. If they documented like the Technet I remember, for the whole WSL game, now that might convince me they mean well towards the open world. But somehow I think Microsoft embraced and only extended the documentation shame...
Who do you give more leeway to, your friend who was great for a long time and has been kind of a dick lately, or the asshole who made your sister cry, punched your best friend, and lied to your fiancee causing her to break up with you, but now says they've changed?
Usually you try to stay as far away from that person as you can. If they want redemption they should find it with a new set of people. They set that bridge on fire while we asked them not to. They watched it burn. They gloated the entire time. The ashes have washed away but many of us remember.
If the asshole says they've changed because they got their brain swapped out with someone else and is now literally a different person, then yes, I'd give them some more leeway. Satya Nadella is not Steve Ballamer. Humans don't get to literally swap out the part of their brain in charge with time.
But Nadella was there during the Ballmer (not Ballamer) years and apparently did not feel that this was a problem enough to pack it in and go work somewhere else. That says a a lot about Nadella in my opinion.
There's very very very few large companies that aren't doing something unethical somewhere. If you're looking for executives who will sacrifice everything due to how someone else in the company is acting then you're going to be down to very few saints.
Are they really saints? Nadella has done a lot more good by changing microsoft's business model from the inside from EEE to one that embraces open source and collaboration than he could have if he quit. Even while he was at Microsoft he was working in the cloud division laying the groundwork for what the company managed to transform into. They're also clearly not focusing their efforts on EEE now - why would they embrace Apple and get office to work on their platform if that was the case? They're not going to extinguish apple - its too powerful, and their collaborations with groups as powerful as Apple, Google, Linux users, etc would be a waste of time if they were still operating with their old strategy. These are immensely powerful rivals, not weaker/fragmented standards that can be extended and extinguished just like that.
They're also clearly not focusing their efforts on EEE now - why would they embrace Apple and get office to work on their platform if that was the case?
Microsoft Office for Mac was first released 31 years ago. It’s nothing new and hence is orthogonal to anyone’s subjective impression of Microsoft’s engagement in EEE.
Microsoft has been the largest ISV in the Apple ecosystem by far, for decades.
But Nadella was there during the Ballmer (not Ballamer) years
I have to imagine that that was an innocent typo. Do you think so? Or do you think that it wasn’t, and so pointing it out helps to discredit the author?
I have to imagine that it was an innocent correction. Do you think so? Or do you think that it wasn't and that so pointing this out is a way to discredit me?
Companies has far more deeper institutional memory and behavior than one person at the top.
Habitual abusers of relationship always promise that they will be better the next time and for a few days they are indeed better behaved. After a while they fall back to the same patterns
Companies aren't people no matter what the law says so you can't compare the two. Companies are run by people and those people change over time which is much more than any single person changes over time. So effectively the Microsoft of today and the Microsoft of 20 years ago are different entities as the people running it are different.
Never trust big companies.
The driving force is always money and if the could get away with it they screw their customers.
MS just changed it's leverage a bit.
VS Code, Github, Edge based on Chromium. There is a pattern.
Of course the driving force is money, thats what makes it possible to trust some companies. Its a simple motive to understand. There are a lot of ways to make money. If the company is making money through a strategy that creates incentives to drive behaviors I like or can work with, I can trust that they'll keep doing that as long as the strategy and incentives stay in place. There's nothing wrong with making money as a driving force. Right now, I can trust best buy to not sell counterfeit/fake electronics and have a good in store experience because that's what differentiates them from Amazon and lets them keep making money. They're not going to try and screw me over because that's not how their business model works. Making money is morally neutral. I could be giving a company money because they're providing me a value add, which is a good thing, or because they're exploiting me through monopoly practices, which is not.
They don't need to sell fake electronics. Ever heard of planned obsolescence?
You already got screwed.
They provide you value?
What do you think advertising is for?
Not everything you think has value for you is also valuable
I think if most of the exec level at a company changes alongside the messaging about changing course it's reasonable to maybe let them rebuild a bit of trust. If it's still the same people then I agree - if you ever think something like that is okay no amount of "we're better now" is going to convince me - you're clearly not to be trusted.
I don't know about Microsoft though - the CEO changed, but what about the rest?
"If a company" - despite what Mitt Romney may have you believe, corporations are not people.
The leadership (both the board and the executives) have changed since that time. I assume you also refuse to buy BMW and Volkswagen cars and actively petition governments worldwide to boycott them because "the company" supported the Nazi's during WWII?
So somehow the amount of time that's passed is a bigger influence than a complete change of leadership? That makes literally 0 sense. 17 years ago Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein - did the country change with a change in leadership? Or is 17 years not enough time for you?
Microsoft hasn't cycled through as many generations of people over the whole company in 15 years as IBM and VW did in 90 years. This should not be a revelation to anyone. Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992. He is worth almost 400 Million USD. He is wealthy in large part due to Microsoft's direction over the last 30 years.
Then there are a lot of companies you won't be buying products from. IBM did work for the Nazis. Popular Japanese car companies made fighter planes used at Pearl Harbor. American auto companies sympathized with Nazis. Household brands that make the food we eat or the medicines we take have produced poisons that have killed many, produced drugs that have ravaged communities, and much more. The things Nestle does are unconscionable. Goodbye water and chocolate. If you've ever had food at a stadium or a cup of coffee at an office then you've probably consumed a product made by Aramark which is known to engage in modern day slavery in U.S. prisons. What about Exxon or BP? Or that TV network in the UK that employed a known pedophile on a kids show? We could go on all day enumerating all the misdeeds companies have committed in the past or are still committing today.
If Microsoft bankrolling the SCO lawsuits is the stand you want to take then be my guest. It was almost 20 years ago, the entire leadership of the company has changed, their culture has changed, and they are pretty much unrecognizable at this point.
I think you're overstating the difficulty of avoiding those companies, at least if you're a reasonably affluent software engineer. I definitely don't do any business with IBM and I'd kill it if it came up at work because IBM is not that great. Weapons production is not that big a deal to me but I happen to not own a Mitsubishi or whatever so I get that one for free. I don't buy bottled water from Nestle and frankly they are pretty bad at making chocolate. I don't buy that nasty office brand coffee either. I don't watch a lot of TV, and I avoid drugs and the medical system as much as I can, by trying to live healthily.
So, I'm already "boycotting" almost every company you listed, without even needing any ideological goal to chase after. The fact is these giant evil mega-conglomerates aren't that great at making things. The more you avoid them the better off you will be.
Now, everything is connected to everything else, so I think the following rules are reasonable for avoiding evil companies:
- If it's a commodity, and it's mixed in with all the other commodities, it's probably not practical to separate the tainted stuff from the cleanly produced stuff.
- If it's a specific company with a specific product that they have specifically done evil stuff to push, that's an example of something to avoid.
- If the same people are in power as when the company was evil, it's probably still evil. If everything but the name has changed maybe they can get another chance. For degrees of change in-between those two, use your judgement.
He joined the company in 1992, when it was as bad as it got and did not see any reason to go work somewhere else. He was totally free to pack up and go but choose to hold on and continued to work there all the way up to today. That makes him at a minimum a silent supporter and at worst complicit. Neither of these speak well for his ethics.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I think it's a little silly to write them off over old stuff that they're no longer engaged in when there are bigger fish to fry. They are making pretty good products these days and, by all appearances, are one of the better players in big tech these days.
I hated Microsoft back then too. They were about as bad as I thought a company could be. At least until I lived long enough to see Amazon, Google and Facebook - or learned about the horrible things other household brands have done.
You assume Nadella had the choice to switch companies freely. You have to keep in mind what it is like to be an immigrant in this country.
Nadella gave up his Greencard to switch to the H-1B program in 1994 to bring his wife to the US (and surely this unprecedented switch was some time in the making). Subsequently he relied on Microsoft to sponsor him once again for permanent residency.
In that situation no immigrants switches employers regardless of their ethics. It often isn't even possible to make such a switch.
Not sure about Linux (and I have no inside info, just public sources), but around 2013-2014, the tech press was full of reports that Microsoft was making billions[1] from Android, by charging OEMs $5-15 per unit for patents Android allegedly violated.
This report[2] from October 2018 seems to indicate that Microsoft no longer does this:
> Ten to 15 years ago we were very focused on the competition between Linux and Windows,” says Microsoft’s chief IP counsel, Erich Andersen, in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “But today Microsoft is a very different company. With the rise of our Azure [cloud services] business, Microsoft has become one of the largest contributors to open source in the world. . . . We’re in a position where, as [CEO] Satya [Nadella] says, we love Linux. We love open source. That’s a big part of the future of our business.”
It's fair to wonder what is truly motivating Microsoft executives, but you can follow the money fairly easily.
In their quarterly earnings reports you can see that about 1/3 of their revenue is from "more personal computing."[0] We know that this category includes Windows licensing, devices (Surface, etc), gaming, and search. About $11 billion per quarter, on average.
They don't neatly break this down in their report, as far as I can see, but some other internet sleuths have made educated guesses based on things that are directly reported. As far as anyone can guess, Windows is no more than 10-15% of Microsoft revenue.
It seems fairly obvious to me that Windows is no longer the backbone of Microsoft. 10-15% still represents billions of dollars, but I think Microsoft would be perfectly content to replace all of that Windows revenue with O365 licenses or Azure billings.
I agree, that despite it not being the future of the company, Windows and controlling the desktop is still a pretty bit contributor to the company's valuation. It would be pretty bad for MSFT if Windows was vaporized tomorrow.
But I think Microsoft is much less paranoid, simply because desktop is a much less attractive target. It's good owning it today, but why would any potential competitor go to war to establish a beachhead in a slowly dying market? Certainly the other big tech companies are much more potentially threatening to MS today. Nobody in 1999 could hit as hard as Google, Amazon, Apple or even Facebook could today.
But why would they even bother? Defending Windows is like Britain worrying about defending Gibraltar. It's still somewhat strategically important, but much less so than in the past. Because of that legacy, it's already defended way past the point of its value to any rational adversary.
Pretty much the entire leadership from that era has cycled out. Ship of Theseus.
Is Microsoft still a 800lbs gorilla that does 800lbs gorilla things? Yes. But let's not pretend they employ the same strategies today that made them the bad guys at the turn of the millennium.
They were monsters for at least 20 years. It has been 6 since Ballmer left, and it takes a few years for an organization to start rebound from the personality of the previous boss.
6 years and a single CEO does not constitute a rebirth. When the next CEO is still doing the same thing, you can talk about what Microsoft is.
Microsoft is a company run by people, and those people have changed (the "they" you mentioned). Gates & Balmer are now nothing more than shareholders (Gates stepped down from the board in March this year). Believe it or not, it's people that determine how a company is run and the people running Microsoft today are not the people that were running it in the 80s & 90s.
Large business units with billions in revenue take years to change direction, and we've seen that clearly happen under Nadella.
I read MiniMSFT while they were active in the 00's. The nastiness we saw continued layers down the chain of command. It wasn't just a despot at the wheel, everyone in the bus was singing road trip songs.
I will admit that it says something that Satya was able to survive inside of Microsoft during the worst parts of this, but I don't know if that says more about how amazing Satya is, or that the internal toxicity is over-reported. We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too, and yet there are still people who enjoy working there.
Everyone has their own version of the truth, but once bitten twice shy, and I've lost count of the bite marks. Have your truth, just keep it outside of arm's reach of my nose, thank you.
And I'm sure it had zero benefit from exaggerating stories to increase readership. I've worked at companies that have been the ire of the press, and know first hand it's many degrees separated from reality.
> It wasn't just a despot at the wheel
Except it was. We've seen this consistently in leadership, including just recently WeWork, Uber and the U.S. government. When a nasty person is at top, it legitimizes nasty people everywhere else.
> We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too,
No, we don't actually know them. We read some news stories specifically centered around warehousing and distribution as Amazon grew from 34,000 employees in 2010 to over 1,000,000 in 2020.
While you're stuck with your notions for the next 6 years or however long until you feel they need to behave, other people, including your competitors, get to enjoy the fruits of evaluating Microsoft for what it is now, not what it was.
Reminds me of when Visual Studio Code came out and some people denied themselves of what would end up being one of the best editors to come out in a while just because they refused to use something with such a Microsoft-ey name...
We are in a world where there are so many options there aren't enough hours in the day to keep up with them all. Do you know why we're in this world? We are in this world because Microsoft stumbled.
They aren't just a large company that people have an old grudge against. They're very specifically the people who kept us from having the option to not consider a particular company and still have any reasonable options at all.
I'm not even going to bother pointing out the dramatization here...
Because this is all tangential to the fact that in a world that now moves one financial quarter at a time, six years is a lifetime.
MS's direction has been consistent and it's been good. If you're waiting for another six years to let MS prove themselves, it's on you, but again, plenty of other people will reap the benefits of not doing so
They chose a different gun, I think. If you told me in 2000 that, 20 years on, Microsoft would be the world #2 in cloud (or utility computing, a concept Sun really tried to popularize in the 90s) computing and IBM would be an also-ran, I’d have laughed at you.
(I guess the news that a bookseller was the world #1 in cloud computing would be even more of a shock.)
I think you need to brush up on what ethics means. It goes a lot further than whether or not you're committing genocide, though, obviously if and when you do you are ethically and morally utterly bankrupt. But this is not a binary affair.
Taking jabs at people that took jobs at Microsoft because you have a grudge says more about you than them. Microsoft never did anything so horrible that someone should have their ethics called into question for working there. Such poor taste.
I can't speak to strategy or whether Microsoft is "nicer" now, but speaking to the day to day as a grunt in the organization: Linux is getting openly embraced. Depending on the context, open source and Linux based solutions are often considered viable choices.
They did, but they started moving away from it. Their big change came two years ago when they opened up their patent portfolio to the Open Invention Network. That meant any company working with Linux can use their patents without royalties. For more on that see: https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-does-microsoft-joining-th...
> Some years back, one criticism I heard against Microsoft was that they threatened to assert patent infringement against Linux, but refused to tell the alleged offenders which particular patents Microsoft considered to be violated. And the end result was Microsoft (imho) legally extorting some Linux vendors for licensing fees.
How would this work in court?
"We're charging you with breaking some laws, but we're not going to tell you which ones. How do you plead?"
It doesn't work in court. FUD works in business because people are (necessarily) risk-averse. If a giant company whose legal team is larger than your entire payroll says they will find some way to sue you for doing X, are you really going to gamble your business to do it? Even if you're fairly sure they're blowing smoke, that's a hard decision to make.
They'd be laughed out of court in a summary judgment. A patent infringement claim requires, at bare minimum, alleging that a patent has actually been infringed. So you have to actually say what patents you own and are alleging infringement of.
Obviously, Microsoft disclosed what patents they believed were being infringed when they decided to actually take people to court. They decided not to disclose that when negotiating licenses, which is actually legal. Contracts can include non-disclosure agreements that would prohibit you from telling Linus what parts of Linus to change, and you're allowed to vaguely threaten people as a negotiating tactic, as long as there actually exists some underlying infringement which Microsoft could reasonably have believed to have occurred. (Otherwise, it would be extortion.)
Patents are public information, including what patents Microsoft has been issued, so the law would assign device manufacturers the burden of determining which of Microsoft's patents have or have not been infringed by their products. Microsoft is not legally required to do their work for them and tell them what they're infringing. All of the parties involved could have conducted patent reviews of the Linux kernel or AOSP to find and remove the infringing bits Microsoft was suing over. Instead, they decided to individually settle because the engineering and legal resources required to fix Android's apparent patent problem were less than just paying Microsoft for a license.
We don't know the exact specifics of any of the patent deals, though, because neither Microsoft nor its new Android-flogging partners are telling. For the most part, we don't even know which patents Redmond is actually licensing.
Few things are as scummy as legal extortion, with contract clauses that prevent that extortion from becoming public. At the very least, refusal to reveal which patents something allegedly infringes, should result in any subsequent patent claims being invalidated. It's like being accused of trespassing, but the property owner refuses to tell you what part of the land is theirs.
A person can make mistakes, make amends and grow into a better person, or they could start good and turn to the dark side. In either case we expect their character to project a certain amount of consistency. An individual that continuously swings between good and bad is likely to be considered unreliable.
People tend to anthropomorphize companies. But companies are not people, they're organizations. They're driven by a mix of individuals who come and go and whose values, vision, motivation and influence shape the direction and actions of the organization at time T.
Because of this uncertainty, never trust an organization with anything forever and learn to be comfortable with the idea that it will change. The promises of one CEO have no guarantee to be upheld by the next.
The first is regarding MSFT patents in Linux itself, and the SCO vs IBM/Linux courtcase of the early 2000s involving Linux. That was basically killed off by a 'put up or shut up' action by IBM and the Linux supporters against SCO/MSFT and their supporters.
The second is regarding MSFT patents in Android which is based on Linux. In that case MSFT threatened to sue manufacturers who were using Android. They found it cheaper to pay royalties to MSFT than having to battle through the courts.
https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15...
Working in a large company (albeit much smaller than Microsoft) gave me an appreciation that there are many disparate voices in a company but it only takes one to sour a relationship. So then you have situations where one department is doing their job by trying to engage with the Linux community while another is doing their job by closing things off. Legal requirements and culture can make it hard for some of those voices to change course. In companies like these I see the main role of the executives being to marshall the voices in a shared direction, vision and understanding.
A consequence of this is that an unintentional mis-step by someone of relatively low seniority can be seen as intentional strategy from the overall entity.
Exactly. We're already seeing the world of Linux according to Microsoft now. It's one where Linux is ideally on Windows with WSL, uses proprietary stacks like DirectX and of course Edge.
What I loved about Linux was that it was not encumbered by attempts to lock in intellectual property (with the idea of future monetising, of course). Yet all the big players are pushing lots of kernel patches to suit their own cloud-based use and ecosystems. Distributions are trying to lock-in like all the commercial players now. Consider Ubuntu with its snap store that can only be run by Canonical.
I really don't like where Linux is headed now that Microsoft and the other big players love it so much... I'm strongly considering moving back to FreeBSD for a desktop. Yes there's Netflix with some input but that's about it.
Their new strategy is mostly marketing. Github was a strategic investment. I think they want their developers back and I think you are on spot with the commercializing of everything, Ubuntu certainly lost appeal.
I disagree. Microsoft's motto is no longer "A computer (running Windows) in every house." The new motto is more or less "Be everywhere (so you can make money off everyone and everything)". Everywhere regardless of platform or device. You can see this with Azure hosting Nix. Azure hosting Playstation servers, or being able to use Microsoft Office on any browser or on iOS and Android.
With this strategy, it doesn't matter what the next platform is because MS will be there.
Really don't see how that announcement is an "extend" move, despite the surface-level phrasing. They're piping host-side drivers through into WSL, only to immediately wrap them back up in Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan. Their use of the D3D API itself is purely an implementation detail, which doesn't lock anyone into WSL.
> Care to explain what's wrong with them? What's anticompetitive about them? Or you just don't like them because "reasons"?
They're all sold in wildly misleading ways.
VSCode is open source according to the website, but the FOSS build is missing a lot of the advertised features (like, say, the extension manager...).
Same with .NET Core. Sure, the compiler and core libraries are open source (if you can find the real thing, rather than the umpteen facades that they pollute their repos with)... But core tools like the debugger are still closed and deliberately locked to only work with (the branded, closed builds of) VSCode. That's not a huge problem if it at least had proper support for printf debugging (like Rust's `Debug`). But of course that's not a thing, because why would you ever use anything else than VSCode?
WSL is sold as a drop-in compatibility layer, but WSL1 was missing a lot of core features (hell, SQLite wouldn't even run with its default settings). WSL2 is somewhat better, but still does a bunch of shady crap (no systemd or equivalent, DirectX-on-WSL, etc).
> What is wrong with it?
For one, there was just no need for it. The only reason for it to exist is to make it harder to port stuff away from Windows.
If they had a problem with Vulkan's API (haven't really used either, so can't comment on the exact differences) then they could have designed it as a layer on top of Vulkan from the start. DXVK already proved that it's a viable approach.
> It's not like it's forced down your throat like Metal. You still have the choice of Vulkan and OpenGL
I find nothing doing a quick search for this. Do you have any evidence of this?
> like the telemetry and enforced upgrades
Neither of which have proven harmful to their users, other than the inconvenience of a forced restart. I'd rather have forced upgrades than the mayhem that existed before.
How do these have ANYTHING to do with Microsoft from 20 years ago?
I have yet to see a human being thats happy about Microsoft edge that's getting shoved down his throat every other windows update. Or one that loves the way every mildly interesting aspect about vscode is proprietary. Or directx12, because why support vulkan when you can just continue locking as many programs to your platform as possible.
Also both telemetry and forced updates impose a giant problem for all administrators in every coporation i worked for since widows 10 was deployed, because they want to get rid of it from a security point of view but management refuses. A former colleague of mine quit his job because he couldn't handle the responsibility and had develeoped serious problems with sleep and general wellbeing
> Windows 10 has group policy controls for IT admins to disable forced upgrades and telemetry.
Only for some SKUs that not all organizations are eligible to license; even for those that are it represents additional expense. And even then, only partially. Telemetry cannot be completely disabled in any Windows 10 SKU. Forced updates can be controlled only via WSUS (by declining them).
> This sounds like complete dramatization.
Please do not inject your value judgements into discussion.
> Only for some SKUs that not all organizations are eligible to license
Who is prevented from Windows 10 Enterprise licenses, other than those already under specific sanctions? Windows 10 Server, Education, and IoT also support disabling telemetry.
> Forced updates can be controlled only via WSUS (by declining them).
They can be controlled via Group Policies, not to mention Microsoft abandoned (most) forced upgrades with the May 2019 Update. Explicit action is now required to install these updates (like you mentioned). The only updates that cannot be disabled are end of service updates, which are every 18 months.
It's only a few years since they replaced Steve Ballmer. Nadella won't be there forever.
I'd be more cautious too. Big companies have their own interests and it's usually not aligned with ours. I'd be less cautious with a company that has resisted going to the dark side. Microsoft definitely has been there.
As an analogy: A criminal can serve their time and be released. But will you share a house with them?
And? Someone else will take his place, who isn't Gates or Balmer and will have their own way of doing things. There isn't some magical Microsoft central force that pulls things a certain direction, it's people making decisions.
Yes that's my point. It can easily change for the worse again. I don't want to be tied up in all their stuff once that happens (which my work is quickly doing lately)
Where do you get this from? Microsoft has reported annual increases in Windows Server revenues for years. Does no one do research before posting about MS? Azure's market increased by supporting Linux, doesn't mean the Windows side suffered.
> do you think they wouldn't be EEE-ing?
Show me one example of EEE in the last 20 years. Go ahead, I'll wait.
I think Nadella deserves a lot of credit for this strategy and Ballmer deserves a lot of criticism for his really wrong windows at all costs strategy that held MSFT back for years.
Their turn around with Nadella is incredible and must be a really interesting story.
I've worked at Microsoft for over twelve years, and I think this radically oversimplifies the story. A lot of the changes that Nadella gets credit for were actually started during the Ballmer years, but it can take a really long time to change things at a company of 100k people.
Stuff like releasing Vscode and Powershell under the MIT license, porting SQL Server to Linux, developing WSL… Did Ballmer contribute to/enable any of that stuff?
I only briefly worked at Microsoft as an intern (during the Ballmer years), but all the things you mentioned are Developer Experience things and from what little I saw/felt/noticed, that was always extremely important to Ballmer. As much laughed at as Ballmer was for the whole "Developers! Developers! Developers!" moment, that very much was a mantra for Ballmer. Despite not having nearly the technical acumen of his predecessor nor his successor, he never forgot Microsoft was a company founded on Developer Tools and Developer Experience. He tried his best to cheer-lead it where he saw it (literally in some cases, hence the moment that got so many laughs around the internet), and enable whatever he could to get the ball rolling for good Developer Experiences. Even when his stubborn "home team or no team" cheer-leading for Windows and Office sometimes got in the way of cheer-leading for Developer Experience, he could still sometimes be persuaded that the right thing for Developers was the right thing for Microsoft even when it wasn't always the right thing for Windows or for Office, because he worked to never forget that cornerstone of Developer Experience to the company. (Though of course he still tried to prioritize where those overlapped, he wasn't as bad as some make him out to be about it.)
Those specific things didn't happen under Ballmer or kick off under Ballmer, but some their predecessors did (the earliest open source projects happened under Ballmer; the Monaco Code Editor was started under Ballmer even if the trajectory to it becoming VSCode wasn't likely clear back then). You can't necessarily draw a straight line from Ballmer era to those those projects that you like, but you also can't connect all the dots without including some of the dots from the Ballmer era too. Ballmer wasn't the great villain a lot of retrospectives seem to want to make him. He was an infectious cheer-leader and sometimes his cheer-leading led him astray (especially in trying to force people to use Windows/Office, instead of trying to encourage people to want to use Windows/Office; probably the biggest distinction between Ballmer and Nadella, and even then it doesn't seem that wide of a gulf as people make it out to be), but his intentions were in the right place and some of his instincts still lead the company in the right general direction (eventually).
It's fairly common to see comment threads every week or two arguing whether CEO compensation is justified and whether they make any overall difference to the performance of the company.
Yeah, while Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone project to quickly accelerate an iPhone-ish design for the first android phone, Ballmer made MSFT's probably largest strategic mistake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qycUOENFIBs
I don't buy the 'things were in motion' while he was there, I think if they were it was in spite of his direction, not because of it.
Funnily enough Zune wasn't even PlaysForSure. Microsoft actually killed their own music player ecosystem to try and create another one that they owned completely. Then the music industry said "fuck it, we're going DRM-free" if only so that they could sell songs outside of iTunes and have them work on iPods.
It helps that Jobs himself hated DRM on music so much that he was willing to give up a legitimate competitive advantage to improve the customer experience.
Microsoft is just another company trying to make money anyway it can. Linux as a project would probably even exist, if nobody would pay for it - just because people can imagine another world, where not everything is about money.
The difference in attitude is staggering and will not go away.
I don't consider MS to be a friend of Linux, quite on the contrary, as a Linux gamer I see MS as still quite hostile. So all this "MS loves Linux" sounds fake, when we still don't get many games coming for Linux and MS pushing their DirectX lock-in. So don't buy their koolaid.
To extend parent, which was for some reason downvoted: Microsoft is purchasing game studios, that were Linux friendly, like Obsidian (Pillars of Eternity, Neverwinter Nights 2, Tyrrany) and inXile (Wasteland, The Bard's Tale, Torment: Tides of Numenera). After the purchase, the new releases from these studios have no longer Linux versions.
Who would have thought why... coming from the company that loves Linux.
Game companies can be blamed for their own things, but I totally blame MS for proliferating lock-in. Where is their backing of Vulkan? DirectX was and is used as an anti-competitive lock-in tool. MS has been doing this for decades and nothing changed in this regard in their attitude.
So Microsoft should just throw away decades of work on DX because your feeling are hurt over Vulkan? Show me examples of Microsoft using coercive practices to make game developers use DX. Otherwise this is just more of the same "lets jump on the anti-MS bandwagon" hubris, looking for any angle to attack MS because that's the trend.
MS threw out their lock-in (ActiveX, Silverlight, whatever) when they lost browser wars and started collaborating on Web standards. What gives?
Nothing stops them from being a good citizen when it comes to GPU APIs too. Except they profit form their lock-in and are hostile to competition (including Linux). So no, MS aren't friends of Linux. They only pretend to be friendly, when it suits them.
Linux gaming is a non-market, 0.59% according to Steam. Providing Linux support is fan service so folks can pat themselves on the back, not to mention bad business, considering the cost vs. reward.
I love Linux, but lets stop pretending desktop is a gaming platform when it's not.
That's a chick and egg problem though. I know plenty of people who maintain a Windows partition purely for games. That doesn't speak to the broader market, but pointing to the current Linux use rate for games to discredit what the use rate would be if it worked as well as in Windows is disingenuous. If Microsoft is actually buying studios intending to remove Linux support (the claim of intent probably also needs more evidence) then that could well be a strategic move to keep people from switching.
> the claim of intent probably also needs more evidence
There is none. Microsoft won't exactly do a press release to confirm exactly that, but the timing of events is suspicious. Things like this do not just happen randomly.
Android mobile gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Guess what isn't? Linux desktop gaming.
> I know plenty of people who maintain a Windows partition purely for games
Selection bias. I'm guessing you know a lot more Linux users than the average person.
> If Microsoft is actually buying studios intending to remove Linux support
My guess is these games need to be compatible with Xbox and Windows, considering that's Microsoft business. That sounds like a completely practical business move.
> Android mobile gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Guess what isn't? Linux desktop gaming.
The name for this is platform politics (and I find it disgusting as a Linux user). Stadia came out having way less users than desktop Linux and game companies run to release for it, while continuing to ignore desktop Linux users. It's not about the size of the market like some like to excuse it with. It's about expected to be paid by "platform owner" or something of the sort.
Linux has no owner, so these companies are at loss from whom to demand extra money, even if they can make profit from actually selling games to Linux gamers. They don't grok open platforms. Better companies which aren't into platform politics release games for Linux fine.
So part of the blame is on those who are hung on platform politics. But it doesn't excuse anti-competitive behavior of MS in the least.
No, the name is business. As it's always been. You seem to have a grudge against companies doing what's best for their business.
> Stadia came out having way less users than desktop Linux
These are not even remotely related. Stadia is a service that is immediately available to a huge market share, and actually has legitimate business opportunity behind it.
> Linux has no owner, so these companies are at loss from whom to demand extra money,
Games is a business, and you go where the money is. Guess where it isn't? Surprise, Linux desktop gaming! Plenty of people are making money (billions) on Linux gaming, just not on the desktop. Because there's an actual market.
Platform politics is not business. Business can work without it, as I explained above.
And yes, I find platform politics to be disgusting and anti-user in essence. Stadia isn't huge as desktop Linux, not even close yet. And potential is all abstract. Linux has also a lot of potential, if these would release games for it. They don't care.
It's not about potential or size of the market, it's about being paid extra incentives by the platform owner. I.e. dirty platform politics.
Calling something politics doesn't make it politics. It's business, plain and simple.
> and anti-user in essence
How is it any different that cars having different parts? Is Ford anti-user because I can't snap in Toyota parts?
> Stadia isn't huge as desktop Linux, not even close yet
The potential market size for Stadia is exponentially larger than Linux desktop, and is a safer risk for game developers and publishers to get behind than Linux desktop.
> It's not about potential or size of the market
Of course it is. What else is it about? Google is willing to make the investment to make Stadia successful, to create a thriving customer base which in turn needs content. That's good business. No one is willing to do that for Linux desktop.
> Android mobile gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Guess what isn't? Linux desktop gaming.
Again, focusing on the current state and not what some eventual steady state might be if Linux were better supported.
> Selection bias. I'm guessing you know a lot more Linux users than the average person.
Definitely true (and I had already explicitly called that out), but the fact that those people exist at all lends plausibility to the idea that the set of people who want Linux but want Windows games might be non-negligible and points to the logical flaw in using the current count of Linux gamers to determine what that market might look like if Microsoft weren't interfering (if they are, not sure on that at all -- taking ancestor comments at face value for now for the sake of argument).
> determine what that market might look like if Microsoft weren't interfering
Can we stop beating a dead horse? There is no Linux desktop market. The year of the Linux desktop isn't here, unlike mobile. Microsoft isn't interfering in anything, there just isn't good business incentive for Linux desktop gaming. Linux desktop gaming will take off when Linux desktop usages takes off, not the other way around.
In fact, if you want to take aim at anyone it should be NVidia and AMD for Linux driver support.
Sounds again like something MS would say. Could you drop this condescending tone? It's not helping your arguments. There is Linux desktop market, including for gaming. Check your facts. It's a smaller market, but it exists even if you don't like it. I'm saying it as someone who buys Linux games.
Trying to debunk this demagoguery is a waste of time. I'll continue being part of the Linux gaming market, and you can claim that it doesn't exist, while whitewashing anti-competitive behavior of MS and the like.
That's totally going to convince anyone who can look at actual stores that sell Linux games which supposedly shouldn't exist according to Linux deniers.
Developing Linux ports is a marginal cost; you are recycling assets and code from your main platform, so that 0.59% will pay for itself. Many companies would do many unspeakable things to increase their market share by half a percent; it is still in millions.
It speaks volumes, when to cancel such a product a new owner, who happens to own one of the competing plaforms, has to do that by decree, with no regards to business results.
As a Linux gamer I find such claims insulting (though I'd expect MS to make them naturally). They simply sound as whitewashing of anti-competitive behavior.
The 0.59% figure is nonsense. Steam only counts you as a Linux gamer if you:
1. Opt-in to stating your operating system(s), and
2. Put ONLY Linux, not Windows.
Otherwise, you are counted as a Windows gamer. Spelunky 2 developers just released their game without Linux support because of this same misconception.
Do you have a better source on the scale of Steam that can represent a accurate market share for Linux desktop? I'm willing to wager money this number is pretty close to accurate.
Very simply, most of the value of Open Source is being collected by major tech conglomerates leasing computing that's freely running OSS software without cost or licensing, of which they're the #2 biggest collector & thanks to the multi-billion in Infrastructure costs + natural lock-in their oligopoly business is protected ad infinitum.
So of course they love OSS now that Azure is one of their largest money printers, it's no longer a threat & they've become one of the biggest beneficiaries of it.
The quote wasn't that Linux was a cancer, it was that some of the open-source licensing was a cancer, in the sense that it forces you to open source all of you own code if you were using a single library.
Use local account, not online account. And use WPD to get rid of everything except automatic updates in Windows. Their telemetry and advertising vanishes.
Also I cannot recommend enough - get a PiHole. That one will help you with Android crap from Google a lot and you can focus on your work instead of policing everything your spouse/kids do in your household.
Microsoft doesn't provide instructions or support for this but yes, it is possible to keep an existing Linux partition intact when installing windows, it will definitely wipe the EFI partition though.
Yes, assuming you have enough empty disk space for the Windows partition, you can do this. I haven't done it in a bit, but I think when you get to the disk partitioning step, you need to click "custom", which then shows your disk layout, and you can have it create the partitions in the empty space. The installer will make the Windows bootloader the default that loads after a reboot, but this can be easily switched back either in your BIOS or using a tool like efibootmgr.
Who in these days uses partitions? I use virtual machines. Get as hosting your preferred OS and then contain any and all operating systems inside VM's.
Actually, just a few days ago, I got fed up with Apple and tried to switch to Microsoft, and make it my main development machine, and so far I have to say I am impressed.
Twitter thread describing the experience: https://twitter.com/PetrHurtak/status/1314854634394185728
Windows 10 is a surprisingly good OS, with a thin layer of crap spread over it (the tracking). But it's still surprisingly easy to remove that layer, and the underlying things is pleasant to use, with wsl as a real game changer, wsl2 even more so.
I was always a windows person on my main computer and I liked 7 a lot but it still didn't quite feel right for devs, but windows 10 really makes us feel at home.
Also you went with a surface pro, which has been a genuinely top of the line hardware serie from microsoft
I was always a Windows native due to hobby game development. Back in the 2000-2010 times, that meant you were using Windows.
The dev tooling on Windows for things that aren't .NET has gotten much, much better in the last 10 years. Sometime in the last 4 years I stopped feeling like I had to have a Linux installation available to switch for my programming needs, and I've mostly just been using WSL instead. I still keep the Linux installation around, but now it's months in between when I boot it up.
One of the few things that are left for end-users to not to switch to Linux is the Office product. I am almost sure that Microsoft is not releasing it on purpose because they are afraid of losing a big chunk of their customers to Linux.
That's a long term losing strategy and I think they're smart enough to know it.
I'm guessing their current response would be "we have Microsoft 365 for the web" which is becoming less and less adequate.
They'll eventually need to decouple the two and sell them independently. At the end of the day, they're a commercial software company - platform wars aren't in their interest.
I think they will hold on as long as they can to release it for Linux.
You are right that they are a commercial software company but they are trying to keep the Windows as "the platform" for enterprise companies otherwise it will be too hard for them to sell everything as a package.
office 365 for web is unfortunately not the same experience.
My father (70) and his cohort will basically only use outlook while my nieces and nephews (~18) when they get into the business world, they're not only unlikely to have any loyalty to outlook and office but they're unlikely to use email as a first tier communication and may not even use traditional word processing packages as a primary method of long form expression.
Nor will they have any of the branding impressions my father's generation had. A chromebook, macbook, or really anything else will be accepted as "alright, I guess I'm using this".
The desktop metaphor is quite stable as is the software. They will be, and arguably have been for ten years, broadly interchangeable.
Microsoft's current positioning is like 1980s IBM. The mainframe strategy worked so long as the people running the business thought they needed mainframes. As they retired out, IBM had to go elsewhere for profits.
And I'd bet the farm Microsoft knows this. They've diversified into video games, source code management, cloud computing, etc seeing this future ahead.
Also this isn't new for them. They're replaying their strategy from 1975-~1990. They never had the better products, they won because they had the better strategy.
Office was a good cash cow, but it's increasingly becoming a harder fit
I worry about the blind-spot the youngest workers may have in this regard.
When I was young and starting out in a corporate job, I also didn't have much loyalty to anything. This wasn't a function of a new age of tech Aquarius, it was simply because I was young and didn't have experience - no basis to form loyalties.
Youngest workers may not realize the value prop of Outlook and Excel fat clients simply because they haven't been hit with requirements that promote or even compel their use, but in the meantime those young workers are never getting highly proficient with the basics of using them. There's a reason more seasoned knowledge workers (not 70yo, but 30-60 for sure) rely on them beyond inertia - broader requirements, favored features, road experience and ubiquity.
Similar angle on your comment about platform loyalty - a young person won't be invested in a platform until they have the experience to recognize the penalties of swapping. Since I mentioned Excel already, keyboard shortcuts in Excel change across platforms. If Excel is considered a given part of your toolbox, this is one of the most aggravating things about swapping OS's periodically: your muscle memory doesn't apply. That's a real hit to productivity. Young people don't recognize this until they develop a skill level that will be impacted by these kinds of changes and are busy enough to not have time to deal with them.
So I wonder sometimes when I hear about that attitude - are they shooting themselves in the foot by not training early on or even having awareness of the potentially more advanced tooling options?
When I start getting into new hobbies I look at the tools the more advanced people use and learn what may (or may not) make them favored - as well as consider new ways of doing things. I also try to start on the better tools even if the learning curve is higher just so I can start racking up XP with them more quickly - so anticipating that a time will come when I too will leverage and appreciate the features, I'll not be starting from scratch. That's worked well.
No, this stuff is irrelevant. There isn't a natural progression.
Pittman shorthand, for instance, was a pretty useful system that only enthusiasts use these days. The most trivial change that axed this was purely social: men learned how to type.
Similarly, business is being done in different ways that will make other old useful tools less applicable.
The march to the grave starts at the crib, sorry about that.
Really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing. You might be right about new generation’s focus shift. If that is true, an interesting future is waiting for us when it comes to business/work software.
Mainstream doesn't use Linux because of no gaming ecosystem. There have been some attempts at getting games running, but for average user it seems too limited. Still in 2020 the Linux desktop experience isn't smooth - you often need to dig into configuration files and it is too easy to mess it up. Then you have Google purposefully turning off GPU acceleration in Chrome so people think that Linux is just slower than Windows.
I think Linux is missing proper UX team dedicated to making basic user problems easy to solve without the need of PhD in computer science.
I think the traditional "desktop Office" is going away completely, even on Windows.
They're building a new Fluent UI for React Native library and it's designed to work across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android. Microsoft Design has blogged [1] about it being the future for the Microsoft 365 initiative (of which Office 365 is a subset).
They've also sunset the "Online" branding for Office Online. It's now simply "Office". [2]
I think they're intentionally blurring the lines here to eventually have everything converge. And save many, many development hours while at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the "Windows Office" will become something hosted in their new WebView2 control (Chromium-based Edge renderer).
It will never go away. Unless vendors will create a CPU that runs natively web, you'll always have "desktop Office". It's just that performance cannot be matched by web apps.
Did Microsoft actually believe that Linux distributions would actually surpass market share? I suppose they never realized that Linux kernel-based technology would hamper their dominance.
It's what, 13 years since Scott McNealy donned a penguin costume, after a decade of trying to first compete and then migrate a developer base? How'd that work out for Sun?
What is interesting is that Microsoft tries to position their subjective attitudes (Linux is harmful/advantageous to their business model at a given point in time) as an objective truth. This is the same tactics used by unethical companies like Coca-Cola trying to convince the general public that soft drinks are not a serious cause of obesity.
We are at 2nd one actually, with their WSL. I keep telling people that right there is a move to migrate developers from Linux to Windows but every time I do that they downvote and disagree.
I used various flavors like Ubuntu for the past 8 years and finally got tired of the half-finished UIs, random bugs that were never fixed, and breaking issues with WINE when I upgraded (and had to spend hours of my free time trying to figure it out).
This, in addition to all sorts of driver issues over the years where I had to download test drivers and compile it myself to get it working has made me never look back.
My new setup is a windows 10 machine with the latest version of Ubuntu running (command line only) on Vmware workstation.
I get all of the stability of a windows machine and can still run all of my favorite Linux apps.
The Windows subsystem for Linux also works pretty well for most things.
I also wonder if it has to do with the anti-commercial stance from most people in the Linux community. Besides a couple of niche apps, most open source is not polished in any way and since many OSS developer have day jobs, have no real incentive to fix a specific bug/issue.
People's experiences do seem to be hit or miss, but for me I have the opposite experience. I am far more productive with GNOME 3 than I am with the Windows desktop environment. I do boot into Windows pretty frequently to play some games but every time there is something that annoys me, whether it's adverts in notifications, being told to use Microsoft Edge _again_ or Windows updates that take ages to install.
I much prefer Linux, not just for development but for every day usage.
People always say the most polished desktop unix distro is Mac OS. That's why I'm on the platform at least. I'd rather pay the premium to have full time engineers troubleshoot the drivers.
Right, my bad. CTRL + W closes current tab in multi tab. CTRL + TAB is the one that cycles between tabs. But I suppose symlinkk wanted to use ALT + TAB for everything.
The goals of the Free/Libre Open Source Software movements and the Corporate Captialist profit motive directly contradict each other. The goal of Capitalism is to enclose/monopolize.
I believe this whole 'M$ loves Linux' is a Trojan horse and we should always remain skeptical until the system changes.
The question is: what are M$'s angle(s) - in the long term?
I think the biggest one is ideology.
M$ will say there are some 'limits' as to what can be open sourced... But those limits will be limits imposed by the current Capitalist system, not the organic human limits. Intellectual Property is better termed 'Intellectual Monopoly', or even 'Intellectual Slavery'.
Couldn't it also be that Microsoft is no longer concerned that the year of Linux as a desktop is never going to happen. Consumer use of Linux OS as a daily driver is never going to be a threat to Microsoft's strangle hold. They know this now. They did not 100% know this in the 90s.
I personally don't think they know this now. As originally defined year of Linux as a desktop is never going to happen but I know lots of people that never come close to a Windows desktop these days. Lots of former windows desktops have been replaced with Phones, Tablets and Chromebooks. While these are not all Linux, they do replace what would have historically been a Windows sale.
MS losing mobile killed the idea of Windows everywhere and once they lost that they had to play well with others or risk sales in other places.
Calling any phone, tablet, or Chromebook "Linux" is only true in the strictest sense that they us a Linux kernel. Everything that is the Linux Desktop experience was scrapped and replaced.
> Everything that is the Linux Desktop experience was scrapped and replaced.
That's true of every Linux distro as well. Ubuntu pretty much scrapped all the shitty looking window managers of RedHat (FWHM, FWHM95, AfterStep, etc.) and replaced it with another one that looks nice but has shitty usability.
Building a good looking and functional window manager on top of a Linux kernel still is a form of Linux in some sense.
I completely agree, but it is worth pointing out that even "the desktop" looks different from how it did when the phrase originated, to say nothing of the digital tools and spaces that are not desktops.
As a daily user of Linux desktops for over a decade (and known to be stick-in-the-mud about my desktop experience), even I have awoken to some shifts in my perspective and expectations, but only in an after-the-fact manner.
It depends what we mean by "Linux" or the "Linux Desktop."
Chromebooks aren't going away, non-Chrome OS Linux desktop usage has seen quite a large uptick in recent years (likely due to ease of installation and compatibility tools like Proton.) Linux, even Ubuntu, has over the years been a headache, however Pop!_OS is the best OS for software development today in my opinion. Regardless of distro, hardware support has greatly increased (as opposed to 2010, where getting a Wi-Fi driver or trackpad to work appropriately on Ubuntu was a chore.)
The primary way people interact with the internet today isn't through a system running Windows, it is through an Android or iOS device. If I have a budget of $200 for a laptop for school, it seems improbable that I'm going to go for a Windows system over Chrome OS unless there is some custom software I can't live without.
I'm sort of outta my lane here, but it seems to me that Microsoft's cloud offerings are going to be far more lucrative and important than revenue earned from desktop OS licensing at some point. Tools like VS Code integrate well with Azure for a reason. Linux dominating the server space isn't something Microsoft is ignoring either.
ChromeOS and Android are successful because they hide the Linux underneath. 99% of ChromeOS and Android users will never see the console. Even when booting, they won't see scroll of kernel messages. Most of the time, the only reference to Linux they'll see is the open source section listing all the licenses.
Ok. So? KDE also hides the "Linux underneath". Boot splash screens have been common since 2.8 kernels. The purpose of Linux isn't to have a terminal and show a bunch of messages. Most computer users have zero interest in that. The goal is to build a working system based on user freedom. In that sense, showing a console window or a config file should be treated as a failure.
We are talking about the market share of Windows, not whether the Truest Way to use Linux is via the terminal.
In the context of the discussion, Windows does in fact have a significant end-user market share threat posed by alternatives like Linux, specifically in the cases of Android and Chrome OS. They are eating Windows lunch.
> Windows does in fact have a significant end-user market share threat posed by alternatives like Linux, specifically in the cases of Android and Chrome OS. They are eating Windows lunch.
Windows desktop is still as massive as ever. Chrome OS has a 0.42% market share, and Android is not a Windows competitor (it's generally a companion).
For a while there it seemed like people were getting more and more computer-savvy. They knew what files formats are. They liked having big USB drives. They got excited over faster internet speeds. You could make the argument that Linux was going to make the CLI mainstream again.
That's dead now. People don't care. They buy a phone because it has a higher resolution screen and then run it in low-res because that's the default and they don't know the difference. Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG.
It’s ridiculous to blame the AP test debacle on the students.
iOS has ~83% marketshare with teens in the US. The fact that AP failed to QA input validation on iOS is an affront to the basic responsibilities of product quality. Submitting an HEIC file would cause the page to time-out with no recourse.
Compounding this is Apple’s decision to abstract file formats to whatever degree possible in iOS. Unless you are an avid tech blog reader or had run into some compatibility issue beforehand, iOS would have never shown you the text “HEIC” anywhere in it’s UI.
> Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG.
I agree somewhat but I think the AP test website makers should take some responsibility too. Limiting the upload to only JPEG and PNG is silly IMO. Wouldn’t really cost them anything to install ImageMagick on their server and accept a much wider range of file formats.
And yes, ImageMagick supported file formats include even HEIC.
I mean, if we are going to talk about having knowledge about file formats and technical details about computers, perhaps the kids aren’t the only ones lacking – so too do the people that keep insisting on only PNG or JPEG in 2020 IMO. Why force everyone to deal with these things when the server could handle much more of it automatically?
> Limiting the upload to only JPEG and PNG is silly IMO.
Or... Use proper HTML to limit what file types you site accepts so users can't upload files you don't support. If a site says it only supports JPG/ PNG on the input element, Safari automatically converts it to JPG.
> For a while there it seemed like people were getting more and more computer-savvy.
"People" in general were never computer savvy. It just wasn't a thing. We went from completely clueless in the 80s/90s to stumbling and frustrating in early 00s and we've pretty much leveled off at marginally capable for the past 10 years.
> That's dead now. People don't care. They buy a phone because it has a higher resolution screen and then run it in low-res because that's the default and they don't know the difference. Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG.
Why on earth should people want or need to deal with nonsense like file formats? This kind of nonsense is what professionals get paid to make clear to end-users. That is a huge part of our job. The case you are talking about is a pretty bad failure on the part of the company running the tests, not a problem with the end users.
I am having trouble following your thoughts on reasons.
> They buy a phone because it has a higher resolution screen and then run it in low-res because that's the default and they don't know the difference.
...neither do I. I have a generic Pixel 4a, $350 off the shelf phone, works great (really - it's nice). I've scoured for this setting, where is it located? I can't find a setting to change screen resolution available on my device, or even if it's possible. It looks great though just the way it is out of the box, I don't know the difference either.
> Kids in California fail AP tests because they don't know what a file format is and try to submit HEIC images to a web form that only takes JPEG and PNG
Apple dealt them this card - you're blaming people for not knowing that a single vendor has introduced a new (image) format by default which really, nobody else is dealing with (I guess?) the way Apple folks are; is it fair to lay this blame on the kid, or does it really belong to Apple trying to push a standard before it was globally (widespread, 80% of the web) adopted? PNG took years to get into tooling, if you recall - it just didn't poof appear, there were many years where JPG and GIF were the only upload formats - in 2020 you're now taking PNG for granted. :) Some day HEIC might be there.
> I can't find a setting to change screen resolution available on my device, or even if it's possible. It looks great though just the way it is out of the box, I don't know the difference either.
This was Samsung I think who launched a phone, bragged about it's resolution, then shipped it with that resolution disabled so they users would get better battery life out the door. Terribly user-unfriendly and a horrible example since users who buy a high end smartphone would expect the phone ship with it's advertised resolution enabled.
> Apple dealt them this card - you're blaming people for not knowing that a single vendor has introduced a new (image) format by default which really...
IMO if you are passing out blame, look squarely at the developers of the web app who failed to create a standards compliant site. If your service is only capable of receiving specific mime types, you specify it on the input element. `accept="image/png, image/jpeg"` If you fail to do so, you will get arbitrary, random file types. If this were a desktop computer, a student might have sent photoshop images or TIFFs. If they'd specified what file formats their web app accepted, the iPhone would have sent JPGs.
I grew up hanging around early 2000's era pixel art communities, so I not only know file formats, but I had very strong opinions on image formats when I was 13. I wouldn't have done any better at the AP submission than those kids did. If it's the default image format my device puts out, and the input doesn't tell me it's rejected, I assume things have worked out.
The year of the nix desktop may be fast approaching. The use of ChromeOS and MacOS has seen steady growth, on Mobile IOS and Android both have nix origins. As a developer of primarily cloud based systems, I find using a windows desktop to be unusual - none of my familiar tools, expectations, and development practices fit with Windows. Based on the macbooks that I'm surrounded by at work, I'd have to imagine others feel similarly.
I know StatCounter isn't 100% accurate, but I'm stunned at OS X being at 27 percent usage share in the United States. I had always assumed OS X usage was still at about 10%, which is where it was a decade ago.
I suspect we'll see this creep up even further in the coming years, if Apple releases cheaper MacBooks (~$700), in response to Apple Silicon lowering their manufacturing costs. They've dramatically lowered the costs of the entry-level iPhones, iPads and watches and I don't see why that same strategy wouldn't come to the Mac.
I think that gets to a major risk of continued windows focus by Microsoft, in 5 years it's possible that Windows market share will be below 50% with most new software written for nix systems. History has not looked kindly on OS's in such an environment, and further market declines may be inevitable as windows begins to look like a legacy platform or a use case specific platform (Games).
I'd have to imagine that Microsoft has been thinking of what their Desktop OS play would be at that point, allowing windows to simply die a slow and profitable death would threaten other business lines such as Gaming. Non-Apple hardware vendors will be looking for OSX like systems to compete with a possibly dominant OSX platform.
If in the 90s you told a linux advocate that "we will achieve the year of the linux desktop by having everybody buy macs" they'd laugh. That doesn't count. OSX has unix at its heart but the open sourceness of the OS is the key thing that advocates want. OSX isn't open source.
fair, it probably depends on what your goal is. OSX certainly relies on more open source code, components, and tooling than windows - but less than debian.
If Desktop Linux was as influential as server Linux, you bet (post Ballmer) Microsoft would be on board. Look at how quickly Microsoft moved on Office for the iPad and Android after Ballmer left the company.
Ballmer era Microsoft was dogmatic "Microsoft Everywhere". Post Ballmer Microsoft is pragmatic. It's a huge contrast. Desktop Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft's strategy, they are now much more cloud focused. Office and Azure, are their big profit centers. Ballmer would be rolling over in his grave[1] if he knew how far down the pecking order Windows had fallen.
I think Microsoft realizes that there is very little profit in consumer grade stuff. Apple makes a profit on phones. Android is just a backdoor that provides access for google's spying operation.
The old desktop is not where the money anymore. It's on smartphones, where the global leader is Linux-based Android, and on cloud-based services, which by and large don't care what OS you're using.
"Pivoted" is a generous description. Scrambled is more like it.
Ballmers tenure did almost irreperable damage to the thesis that Microsoft was a modern technology company that could operate outside cloth-walled cubicles and quarterly corporate financial planners. With every advance in Linux, Ballmer doubled down on in-house developed analogues and near-Khrushchev rhetoric against not just the OS but the fundamentals of open source. While Google and AWS catered with open arms to all, Ballmers vitriol led redmond down a myopic path of scorched earth ideations in the service of a dead business model.
A cogent argument could be formented that XBox revenue and corporate license renewals were the only thing that kept Redmond from cutting staff and folding divisions during Steves tenure....divisions that in bitter retrospect should have folded far sooner than they did (Phone and the physical store for example.) Steve kept his corner office and the favour of the board thanks to quietly dipping into the coffers of these underappreciated touchstones of the company but in the 21st century...these werent growth.
After saying in 2008 that he intended to remain CEO for another decade, Ballmer announced his retirement in 2013. Microsoft was running on fumes and while Steve managed to coast the hills, Satya was ready at the pump.
The insensitive truth is that the real cancer all along was Steve.
Being a Microsoft empmoyee at the time Steve was CEO, i think you are grossly undermining his fundamental work to what Satya is now also capitalizing on.
I don't know Satya from the inside, so I will not say anything, other than he does not seem to have initiated a lot. I might be wrong.
You don't turn a business as Microsoft into a super attractive stock overnight. But Ballmer, Kevin Turner, and Guthrie to some extent put in a lot of effort to create what is now being run by Satya.
I'm genuinely curious to hear how you might elaborate on this.
The Balmer-scream years were very formative to my outlook on the tech world, graduating high school in 2005. Only recently did I bother to see what MS had been up to in the past 10 years ( was down a different industry rabbit hole ). A colleague told me 3-4 years ago what MS had been working on and it seemed to me like there was a light switch flipped somewhere.
This seems to be directionally correct. To compete with Amazon and get on the cloud train, Microsoft got into the services business with Azure. However, with Azure, it doesn't really matter what OS your customers are using because they are paying you for compute time either way. Thus, Microsoft could safely embrace Linux without sacrificing their revenue line. I'm not sure if this was Microsoft's intention initially, but it certainly seems to be how things are playing out.
