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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: 3, Insightful) by bobthecimmerian on Saturday March 31 2018, @07:50PM
From an end user perspective that's the benefit and the drawback of free software, right? If there's abandonware (like old kernel API formats) you have the freedom to maintain it yourself or pay someone else to do it. But if you lack the skills, time, or money, you're screwed. I think history has demonstrated that this particular major headache with free software is a lesser evil than all of the locked down, DRM, privacy-violating garbage the proprietary vendors hit us with.
But it's a terrible situation either way. A few years ago at one of the FSF conferences a presenter made the point that freedom by itself means nothing. You can tell a starving man with no money that he's free to buy all the food he can eat, and that freedom has no value and won't save his life because he has no money. The free software world has that problem in spades - access to source code that you lack the skills or resources to use.