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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Microsoft is taking the fight to Chromebooks in schools with the $250 Surface Laptop SE, but inexpensive hardware is only part of the equation. One reason Chromebooks have succeeded in education is because of Chrome OS, which is well-suited for lower-end hardware, easy for IT administrators to manage, and hard to break with errant apps or malware.
Microsoft's answer to Chrome OS is Windows 11 SE. Unlike past efforts like Windows in S mode (which is still its own separate thing), Windows 11 SE isn't just a regular version of Windows with a cheaper license or a cut-down version that runs fewer apps. Windows 11 SE defaults to saving all files (including user profile information) to students' OneDrive accounts, and it has had some standard Windows 11 features removed to ensure a "distraction-free" learning environment that performs better on low-end devices. The operating system also gives IT administrators exclusive control over the apps and browser extensions that can be installed and run via Microsoft Intune.
If you're a school IT administrator with a fleet of PC laptops or desktops, you might wonder if you can buy and install Windows 11 SE on hardware you already have so you can benefit from its changes without buying new hardware. The answer, Microsoft tells us, is no. The only way to get Windows 11 SE is on laptops that ship with Windows 11 SE. And if you re-image a Windows 11 SE device with a different version of Windows 10 or Windows 11, it won't even be possible to reinstall Windows 11 SE after that.
[...] Microsoft has published documentation (PDF) that more fully explains the differences between Windows 11 SE and the other editions of Windows (including Windows in S mode).
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday November 12 2021, @05:39PM (1 child)
Not according to the finance markets. Microsoft's market cap just overtook Apple.
Pathetic, but that says as much about the degeneration of the western populations as it says about the usual greed of any megacorp.
(Score: 4, Informative) by choose another one on Friday November 12 2021, @06:28PM
> Not according to the finance markets. Microsoft's market cap just overtook Apple.
Also worth noting that most of the value is now outside of Windows the OS. I remember when Google was being touted as the new cloud provider to maybe come second to AWS, and the laughter from many quarters when MS started a cloud (I mean what did MS know about big datacentres FFS?). Look where Azure is now (and a lot of it ain't running Windows). As well as the continuing strength of Office on the client side, over the last decade or so MS has created (or in many cases, bought) a huge server/services application portfolio upscaling the DB (SQL Server) to be a serious competitor to Oracle &co., Sharepoint, Dynamics/CRM, BI tools, Teams, etc. Those are all big ticket items if implemented at scale, and they do all scale now.
Windows OS? - meh. I wouldn't be surprised if internally "Windows" was the last place MS staffers want to work these days. It's on the way out.
The future is WSL - look how they named it: "Windows Subsystem for Linux", right now it gives you Linux hosted by Windows, in future it'll be Windows (Win32 / userspace) hosted on Linux, won't even need a name change.
I reckon Windows, at least on client machines, has 10yrs left now.