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From the NY Times: "The Windows era at Microsoft, long in eclipse, is officially history. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it was splitting up its Windows engineering team and that the leader of its Windows business was leaving."
Microsoft is ready for a world beyond Windows
"We want to move from people needing Windows to choosing Windows, to loving Windows. That is our bold goal," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella three years ago. At the time, Microsoft was unveiling more details about Windows 10, and surprising people with technologies like the HoloLens headset. It was an exciting time of opportunity and optimism that had Microsoft betting on people loving Windows so much that Windows 10 would be running on 1 billion devices within three years. Neither wager worked out — which is fine, because Windows as we know it is no longer critical to Microsoft's future success.
Microsoft announced a new reorganization yesterday. It's the fourth major shuffle inside the company over the past five years, and the most significant of Nadella's tenure. Microsoft is splitting Windows across the company, into different parts. Terry Myerson, a 21-year Microsoft veteran, is leaving the company and his role as Windows chief. The core development of Windows is being moved to a cloud and AI team, and a new team will take over the "experiences" Windows 10 users see like apps, the Start menu, and new features. There's a lot of shuffling going on, but Nadella's 1,300 word memo leaves little doubt over the company's true future: cloud and AI.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 31 2018, @02:27AM (12 children)
In other words, MS has figured out that most people with PCs really are better served, for what stupid petty BS they do, by a walled-garden cell phone. There's little money to be made in the consumer market as it is now, so they want to follow the trend (I am calling this now: Windows As A Service a la Office 365...) and shift to more profitable ways of doing business.
The much-ballyhooed Year of the Linux Desktop may, therefore, be sometime in the early 2020s, although by then I would think many people would have ditched general purpose computers for phones and tablets.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Virindi on Saturday March 31 2018, @03:04AM (6 children)
More "decided" than "figured out". The PC (and thus Windows) exodus is as much a result of Microsoft constantly making the PC experience worse as anything. It was their own attitude that hastened their demise.
They destroyed a market they had a lock on. Now apparently they want to bet their future on whatever is trendy today. Greaaat.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 31 2018, @06:09AM (2 children)
But of course. That market had no potential to grow the way the "consumable" devices could.
Where's the profit in producing yet another version of Windows/Office every 3 years if the consumers stick with the previous version from 10?
And if you don't produce anything new every 3 years, what's your business then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Apparition on Saturday March 31 2018, @06:40AM (1 child)
Their business is selling Windows 10, Office, OneDrive, and Azure subscriptions to businesses and government agencies. Oh, and XBox Live subscriptions to gamers. What's better for the company? Selling new versions of Windows and Office every three years, or selling monthly subscriptions at $10, $20, or $30 per user?
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Saturday March 31 2018, @10:19AM
Selling family plan Windows rentals *cough* subscriptions *cough* with each feature being an in app purchase+rental per device. Devices can be user locked to require transfer fees (possibly marketed as a cloud data transfer service). Working from home can be restricted + rented via forcing cloud storage via Office365 then requiring access licenses per device.
Looks like a neat racket. Adobe loves it so far. Of course, for the photography I do they've fostered a quickly growing market of alternatives which is great.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hamsterdan on Saturday March 31 2018, @08:18PM (1 child)
iOS and Android killed the home computer market. I'd say 98% of people could get by with just a tablet. Win 8's trainwreck interface didn't help, but tablets killed the home PC market
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Virindi on Saturday March 31 2018, @08:55PM
Yes, and I think the reputation of PCs of being insecure, hard to use, bloaty, and annoying is a big part of the success of tablets.
Look at what people were using just before tablets: netbooks that had a stripped down set of hardware and Windows (MS went out of their way to kill off any Linux netbook attempts). Because of the nature of Windows, these devices had way too little in the way of hardware for the software that came on them. Thus, they were slow and generally a bad experience.
MS has been trying to sell tablets with Windows on them since the 1990s, including a large push to make them in a similar hardware era to the dawn of the smartphone (they called it the "UMPC"). The problem was the same as always: crap software caused the hardware requirements to be out of control, resulting in a clunky product with short battery life.
Tablet versions of Windows have existed for pretty much every version since Win3.1.
The same problems apply to the various iterations of a Microsoft smartphone. They have been making them since the 1990s (Windows CE...). However, "mobile Windows" devices have always cost more and been less capable than the competition. The more recent (last 10 years) Windows Phone attempts have been particularly bad; every new version was a complete reboot, the builtin software barely worked, and the hardware was clunky.
MS drove people away from their own stuff.
(Score: 2) by Teckla on Sunday April 01 2018, @12:00PM
Has there really been a PC exodus? I'm skeptical of such claims. The PC market has slowed down, I think, because advancements in hardware performance have slowed to a crawl, meaning people have moved to a longer upgrade cycle. Microsoft still seems to have a nice, solid desktop OS monopoly, especially in business, where the majority of the PC business exists.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31 2018, @01:31PM (2 children)
If it means anything, my mother and one of her co workers have asked me when they're forced to go to Windows 10, they want to install Linux because Windows has become such a POS. They don't even care if there might be problems, having someone help them out, or fix things when they break is better than dealing with the constantly broken mess of Windows 8.1/10.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31 2018, @05:49PM (1 child)
It's not like users themselves demand much. e.g. most users would be satisfied with a Windows XP that supported more than 4GB of RAM (thanks to browsers and webpages that take lots of RAM). And for most users Windows 7 kinda served that purpose. But instead we have really retarded stuff like the Metro UI and the Windows 10 _enforced_ near "bricking" updates.
Meanwhile the other strange thing is whenever Microsoft makes their OS crap the "mainstream" Desktop Linux bunch seem to try to make their stuff crappier. There's a window of opportunity for the Desktop Linux bunch to gain significant share by making something that's much better but they will probably shoot themselves in both feet time and time again. "WONTFIX", "WORKSFORME". No, systemd is not much better, it's a near useless change that won't really help normal desktop users much.
There are actually interesting problems for Desktop OSes to solve. More interesting than how to make a Desktop Computer as crappy and restrictive to use as a tablet. Or making them boot a few seconds faster (which could probably have been done without something like systemd.
For example, Virtual and Augmented Reality hardware is going to become more affordable and accessible. Just an obvious feature/problem for an OS - imagine having access to as many screens you want which are as big as you want - limited to the CPU and RAM of your computer. So how can a Desktop OS best augment normal people to be able to do even more? To paraphrase the Perl saying - make easy things easy and hard things viable.
Nvidia, Intel and AMD would be happy to sell the hardware capable of that and more.
But instead Microsoft wants to make our Desktop Computers into tablets. Instead of augmenting people they want to put restrictions and leashes on us. Why the FUCK would I want something like that? Yes my smartphone is convenient for when I have to be on the go but it is so difficult to do more advanced stuff on it.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:47AM
Actually, systemd does make it better (although the init system and service manager are invisible to the average user). Sane event handling is impossible under sysvinit/initscripts or openrc: USBs being plugged in and removed, bluetooth audio devices being paired and removed, wireless networks connecting and disconnecting.
Of course, it's up to the distros to actually package that up correctly, and they haven't finished doing a thorough job yet.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bobthecimmerian on Saturday March 31 2018, @01:50PM
There's little money to be made in the consumer market as it is now, so they want to follow the trend (I am calling this now: Windows As A Service a la Office 365...) and shift to more profitable ways of doing business.
I think Windows for PCs and Xbox and the failed Windows Phone mostly exist as enablers for Microsoft's business income. My kids' schools are loaded with Windows laptops. One of my sons and several of my brothers and most of their friends game together on Windows PCs. We don't have an Xbox, but a lot of my kids' friends have one. I think even if all of those make no profit for Microsoft, they lead typical end users to be most comfortable with Windows at work. So if the company has to spend 30 billion dollars a year on consumer computing to facilitate their 70 billion dollars a year of business revenue, it's a worthwhile investment. I don't know what the actual cost vs. return is, I made that example up. That strategy works for Microsoft, it ensures that consumers finishing high school or college or even older adults that went back to school come out of their education program accustomed to using Microsoft products.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled Microsoft screwed the pooch on mobile operating systems and I think that error will kill them eventually. But I genuinely think we're ten or twenty years away from it having a serious impact. They have their hooks into everything, and it will take a long time for Android, ChromeOS, and similar to chip away at it.
(Score: 2) by Teckla on Sunday April 01 2018, @11:56AM
Stupid petty BS? That seems pretty harshly judgmental...
People have been "calling" Windows-as-a-service for years now. This is nothing new...
Chromebooks run Linux and could be considered a desktop (especially as more and more of them are capable of running Android applications). They're crazy popular at elementary, middle, and high schools. So perhaps Linux-on-the-desktop is already here, and gaining momentum.