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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: 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.