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Microsoft Is 'Demoting' Windows for the Cloud, Says CNN (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Microsoft is giving Windows a demotion, and leaning into the cloud. CEO Satya Nadella told employees on Thursday that Terry Myerson, leader of the Windows and Devices Group, is leaving the company. "Microsoft has been my work, my team, and my purpose for 21 years," Myerson wrote in a LinkedIn blog post. "It is an emotional day"... The shakeup includes the formation of two new engineering teams that will prioritize Microsoft's cloud and artificial intelligence products -- a move that should make investors happy, said Brad Reback, a software analyst at Stifel. Morgan Stanley said recently that Microsoft could hit $1 trillion in market value within a year, thanks in large part to the strengths of Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing service, and the cloud-based Office 365 software suite... Amy Hood, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said in January that the company's commercial cloud revenue grew 56% year-over-year. In that quarter, Windows commercial products and cloud services sales fell 4%.
No, 2019 is the year of the the end of the desktop.
Linux will never be the big desktop OS we have been waiting for. We can hope it will be the Workstation OS of the future. Because we no longer need Desktop PC's. We need Workstations where we can do real work. For the fun stuff we have consoles, and tablets, and mobile devices. Which for most people would be more then enough for their use. A tablet with Office, and a blue tooth keyboard is more then enough for most people.
This is a different condition 10 or 20 years ago, where a PC was needed for nearly any computing event. At that point Linux for the Desktop may had have some real benefit, saving us from countless windows crashes, because pre-xp windows were based off of the MS DOS OS, while XP and up where based off the workstation base NT system. (Windows 2000, wasn't a PC OS but a workstation OS to replace NT 4)
However today we need more serious Linux systems, designed for productivity and taking advantage of the Workstations hardware and graphics, and less trying to appeal to work for grandma, who at this point probably has more computing skills then you do.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unlikely. If MS offers Office for Linux then I think you would see mass migration.
But, as it is, that is not going to happen.. likely ever.
If anything, now that Apple is finally starting to support upgrading graphics cards increasing gaming performance, we may see folks switching platforms. Even a lot more hackintosh machines for the DIY man/woman.
In the commercial software space, there is a great deal of pressure to migrate/establish userbase to cloud customers. Not because it is a channel to deliver capabilities otherwise impossible, but to transform your customers from transactional to recurring revenue.
In the transactional situation, you have to find some compelling motivation to drive users to conduct another transaction with you. Rpoblem is at some point you pretty much "finish" your vision (office 97 can achieve largely the same results that current office can do) and further tweaks to your product aren't enough to drive revenue. Making companies live in fear of being end of support and the treadmill of office format compatibility can carry MS far, but nothing beats making the software evaporate when the periodic payment doesn't happen.
Note that with Office 365, the use of the internet can be quite low, you install it locally and can ignore online mostly, except it checks subscrption status, but that's not much bandwidth.
They can also, frankly, take their eye off the ball with Windows. It's market situation is pretty well set. They've tried to expand it and failed utterly (Windows 8 strategy of screwing the desktop users to try to drag them into liking a phone-capable UI), they've tried to move the application publishing norm to an Apple/Google like one (which is also a failure) and tried to make Windows lock users into the store to make it more appealing (S edition, which did nothing). At the same time, even as they obviously pissed off customers (Vista, 8), their market share was steady, so it's also the case they can't lose more than they have.
So simplify their support burden as much as they can (you *will* be updated to the most recent 6-ish month release, because it's the same) and coast. Have to continue to do sustaining investment as it is their foundation for other services, but growth investment is a lost cause (can't get beyond 95% share, wouldn't be worth it if they could, and can't leverage the platform to break into more markets).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The average user never valued the features that the technically-minded bemoan losing. Strong(er) privacy control, opt-out availability, clear diagnostic information....I mean, these are the people who expose their lives to the world in exchange for free entertainment, who never bother to learn about what they use (or how it uses them!), and who were tired of having to deal with people like us directly to get their stuff fixed. They just don't care...but their dollars speak louder than our words. They blindly accept what the big corps tell them because everybody else is doing it, so why shouldn't they? Resistance is futile...
You seem to miss that at least two tablet OSes are basically highly-tailored Linux distributions, locked-down to prevent the end-user from getting to the guts, as a tradeoff trying to maintain a disciplined approach to how applications are to run and interact with the user on the platforms. I'm speaking of Android and ChromeOS.
The vast majority of end users never really needed the down-in-the-trenches approach that early personal computing offered and even arguably required. I suppose that helped contribute to Apple's penetration into the educational market with early Macintoshes, the lack of transparency and ability to tinker with the OS was a downside for computer enthusiasts, but was an advantage to those who didn't care how the underlying device worked, they just wanted to open a program and have it work right. Granted, eventually pre-OSX MacOS got pretty messed up by the end, but for a long time the approach seemed to work well enough.
When I see a tablet, I see the natural evolution of that model for how personal computing works. Hell, tablets even have screens similar in-size to many of those early Macintoshes. There's no digging into the OS, but most people don't want to do that anyway.
I've used Linux for my desktop operating system for the better part of twenty years but I can see why it would be the less desirable option for most people. Even for me it's a headache sometimes as the community fights over things or where development in some major projects stalls or goes off the rails. I put up with it mostly because it was not really any harder than Microsoft's approach back in the day, and because I don't like paying for basic software. For awhile I played with an old Chromebook and Crouton to run a Linux/X11 chroot environment, and it worked pretty well actually. I just wanted more/better than the Chromebook's hardware had to offer, so back to Debian I went.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It really just means they recognize that no matter how well they do or how poorly they do, the role of the Windows OS in the marketplace is pretty well set. They tried massive investment and dramatic changes, they didn't break into new markets like they hoped. They inadvertently pissed off the userbase several times, never made a dent.
So the business call is to just start coasting. don't waste money trying to grow, and don't think that continued innovation is really required to hold on to their market. For their future evaluation of potential products, the question is easy: can this product be rented instead of purchased? If they can't figure out a way to rent the product or use the product to drive people to rent something, they would rather direct their efforts elsewhere.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
LOL. It has been going back to this since 1997 with the start of the early web and Novel Netware and ethernet.
Yes the Mainframe is the computer. The difference is Amazon and MS are the new mainframe gods you use to connect to your systems. People baulked at the cost of the IBM mainframe and switched to VAX or even mainframe-less environments to cut costs for simple things like spreadsheets, email, and word processing.
Funny is the needs of a large centralized system never went away. These simple tools and files became essential and managers needed a way to manage them viola a netware and later NT file mapped drive. Active directory, and last now this to manage.
What goes around comes around. What is interesting is the cloud was a way to manage websites originally. Not PC programs or operating systems. It grown into that.
http://saveie6.com/
Because we no longer need Desktop PC's. We need Workstations where we can do real work.
They're the same thing. A workstation is a desktop in a corporate environment. There are hundreds of millions of people using desktop computers in small businesses or at home. I use one to write up contracts and estimates and bills, to produce diagrams for work, to edit photos and pages for my website...
Anyone who merely does as much as working occasionally with office software needs a desktop because nothing else is ergonomically suitable. You *can* edit photos and write docs on a phone. That doesn't make it a replacement for a fullscale computer.
..."We've found a way to make you pay again for Windows every month!"