I don't think it is a matter of really understanding the tech. It has to do more about how you envision the society regarding privacy and individual rights. It is indeed a political point of view on how much you want to control everything.
Not directly related to the article, but, the way we played multiplayer games on a sofa back in the 90s was way more funnier and fullfilling than what it is now through steam/discord. The sharing was not the same.
It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux. Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition.
Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.
It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter .
I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed by the world.
Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two separare activites that don't need to be tied together. There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still tied to Windows directx.
The thing is that OS is not important these days as you can apps on thin clients now and a lot of folks are spending most of the time within apps and doing nothing else.
I think that it is not exact. OS is as important as yesterday since you need them to run your containers that provide your services used by your thin clients. This is still the backbone of everything. But you have a point windows kinda lost the servers battle.
yeah. I think they have did some refactoring in OS though, to make it more modular. Not sure what are their long term plans for Windows. They probably would have benefitted from some handheld UI for sure.
They tried a handheld UI, with Windows phone but it failed. I think mostly because their UI was too far from what people expected aka something looking like ios (Android UI is almost a copy of iOS UI) and also because they came into the market too late with too few product innovations to be appealing. With 5% of market shared, this was not worth the cost, for devs on the plateform. If they want a comeback in the smartphone industry, maybe they have something to play with copilot and AI. Like an Android with free AI agents out of the box.
Selling licenses is not where the money is. Selling subscriptions to corporations so that every corporate-supplied computer (including Macs) pay Microsoft for something, be it Office or a full Windows+Office+Sharepoint license. All things considered, they can give Windows for free and they'll still profit from it as an enabler for further Microsoft lock-in.
I had a hard time choosing which comment to select to reply, so I chose yours since it's higher up. Apologies if it's irrelevant.
I don't know why most people assume that hackers even bother with stolen credit cards in the first place. I mean, they sure do, but those are your average Joes in the business of refund reshipping and other types of scams.
Those who want the maximum anonymity don't even bother with buying anything. It's as simple as going to one of the popular websites who leak databases, setting up OpenBullet software or spending anywhere from 1 to 5 hours writing custom mail:pass validators to spam requests to either API or login form through (once again) leaked proxies, etc. using leaked credentials. Or simply going into one of those threads titled 'x100 Mullvad accounts" which have already validated accounts with anywhere from 1m pre-paid to multiple years. And there's even a bonus of not being shown as a user of this account if you do not use official App and simply load configuration manually through ovpn, etc.
And then there's proxy-chaining if you're doing something truly nefarious. It's super easy to chain multiple VPNs with few socks proxies.
People behind XZ backdoor to me look much more smarter than myself, so I would bet they took care of this angle and will be untraceable.
