Sony believed that they had so much market share that they could make a console that was leaps and bounds more complicated to code for, which would lock devs in and prevent them from going elsewhere, and they’d just have to suck it up because of said market share. Sony was wrong, and they lost out big time that generation (although they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars).
Microsoft seems to believe they have so much market share that they can force people to upgrade to a privacy invading, ai infested piece of crap, and that everyone needs to suck it up because market share.
I’ve already started hearing wind that people, in statistically significant numbers, are finding alternatives… so is this the same situation as the ps3?
Just a passing musing without much to back up the gut feelings.
Microsoft is correct.
The PS3 lost out to the 360 because of more than just Sony. The 360 was shilled hard by influencers.
Most Windows users are too stupid to care about the issues with Windows or switch to something better.
I think it’s more comparable to say the same kind of mistake that Microsoft made with the Xbox One. Sold at a $100 premium over the playstation 4 because Microsoft assumed that everyone would love to get a bundled Kinect when actually nobody did.
Also when they announced the stupid DRM that they wanted to use on the Xbox One (console must be always online to work, games on disk to become single use gift cards that get redeemed to a Microsoft account and can’t be used on a different console) Probably Sony won the console war with this single 20 second video even if Microsoft backtracked immediately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
With windows 11 Microsoft is doing similar mistakes:
- With x86 processors, assuming that everyone has the money to buy a new computer even if their old one could work perfectly for what they need. Last week I went to visit an elementary school in my country and at the wall in the computer room they still had a poster comparing Netscape and Internet Explorer. They definitely don’t have the funds to throw and buy again 30 computers. Time for Linux to shine?
- With arm processors, making it an exclusive for the expensive snapdragon x. Result: those laptops cost even more than comparable x86 ones, while could be cheaper. Look at the recently launched Minisforum R1. A full desktop computer with 32gb RAM and an ARM CPU that is comparable to a core i5-10400F while costing only $500. But because Microsoft chose to support only the most expensive snapdragon processors, this brand new computers can exclusively run Linux. Time for Linux to shine?
I think the biggest decider of how quickly the world transitions away from Microsoft or Apple, is dependent on how the USA looks within a decade. If fascism in the USA stays strong, it would have knock-on effects with foreign relations. Should the USA pull out of NATO and sides with Russia, that by extension implies that US software could be hostile to European powers. The excel spreadsheet with fiscal data for Polish military expenditures? It might be sent straight to a three-letter agency and shared with Russia. Internal French memos that oppose the US? Leaked. And so on.
That would cause a major shift towards FOSS from governments across the world.
And honestly you’re not hearing that people in broad swath of numbers are replacing Windows you’re hearing in a very echo chamber like here or Reddit or possibly dig that people are replacing windows it’s still a small number statistically and while it’s slightly growing it’s still not enough that’s going to matter to Microsoft even in the least bit. The average person is not going to know what to do and the average person is not going to understand or even know that there’s an alternative besides macintosh. Nor are they going to attempt to install an alternative version of an operating system. I mean hell I couldn’t even convince my dad to buy a $200 laptop over the $900 gaming PC for the 40 minutes of work he does on computers a week. Some people just are going to do what they do out of habit and not even care.
Nah, price killed PS3 and with Windows, OEM’s eat the cost anyway. If its cheap, people will buy it. MS isn’t making things harder for developers, they aren’t increasing the price of windows, they offer support to orgs, they offer a whole suite of software for them too, they aren’t going anywhere. They’ll lose out some of the consumer market, but thats not where they get their money from anyway.
I work in IT. IMO, the civilian population moving to Linux is inevitable. As Linux finds itself and good ways to do things that don’t require people to know bash, or customize options by manually editing config files, things will push that way.
IMO, it will happen, but not quite yet. We’re seeing the initial push of the privacy conscious and those that want to avoid becoming a product. It’s good, but we’re not there yet. We’re also seeing some pretty major players, most notably valve, pushing for consumer goods that are unashamedly Linux under the hood. This is, slowly but surely, pushing forward compatibility for apps running on Linux.
We probably won’t see any line of business apps adopting a Linux build any time soon, and business in general actually wants the majority of what Microsoft is pushing for… Along with government institutions (for their own needs), and more. I don’t see business moving towards Linux anytime soon… Not beyond it’s current role in server operations.
As stuff like steamOS get better and better, and find ways to solve problems in consumer friendly ways, that knowledge will feed back into existing Linux tools. We’ll get to a point where Linux will be as plug and play as Windows, and that’s when we actually have a good chance of migrating a lot of personal PCs to Linux.
The Battle for the workplace is still a long way out. Well after the Linux home PC is commonplace. People at the office will simply have more experience with Linux, and push for being able to use Linux at work and eventually that’s going to start to happen… Probably not in our lifetimes.
To me, it’s only a matter of time. Unless Linux undergoes a hostile takeover and unforeseen bullshit happens, it will happen.
It will happen when you see Linux PCs and laptops at Best Buy right beside the windows and macos ones.
I’m pretty sure this is a repost of a comment I read in 2004.
Well, I didn’t lift it from anywhere. So, I guess there’s dozens of us?
I was half-joking how similar this is to things people have been saying for decades
And then Microsoft made the same mistake with Xbox One+Kinect.
But then quickly stopped making Kinect mandatory. Plus the Kinect was a wonderful piece of hardware.
Seriously they provided a kinect less bundle 6 months after launch
Seriously they provided a kinect less bundle 6 months after launch
I wonder why 🙄.
I would add Xbox One+Kinect+Always online+the used games policy.
And Microsoft might be right this time. My mid size organization for example is locked in to microsoft, we use the Office suite, AD, Teams, their ERP system, Windows servers, Windows desktops, outlook, etc.
I would love to go the Foss route but let’s be real, the costs that would save would quickly be overshadowed with learning to set it all up.
Let me know if I’m wrong here, I really am open to moving over but it’s a massive undertaking.
Steps to slowly escape are this:
- Install Debian + samba 4 on a server, configure to run it as an active directory server
- Join that server to the work domain as a backup domain controller
- Install onlyoffice on all computers and set it to use onedrive
- Meanwhile install nextcloud and get used to that with a small part, with onlyoffice.
- Migrate the users that don’t use too much Microsoft 365 to nextcloud instead of onedrive, onlyoffice+nextcloud instead of office, nextcloud talk instead of teams
- Start to decommission one windows domain controller and let the Debian domain controller do its work.
- The escape door is open, start to escape
Alternatively can do the same with “Univention Corporate Server (UCS)”, which is the same stuff, but packaged with a nicer UI (it’s a paid product, based on Debian)
In the short term, even if it’s free, having someone do this work will definitely cost more than paying the license for windows server + all the user CALs + the office 365 subscriptions but I think ROI in 5-7 years
Maybe for home computing which isn’t their priority. They’ve always had their bread buttered by corporate business
No way, unlike Windows 11, the PS3 was actually quite a good product.
Every other version of windows flops or sucks. 98 SE, good. 2k/ME, No. XP, great. Vista,no. 7, great. 8, No.
10…probably the last good Windows unless M$oft unfucks itself and makes 12 good. But I doubt it.
Definitely wouldn’t equate 2k with ME.
Under the hood, 2K is much different from and more stable than ME.
they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars
They didn’t win them: they bought them. Blu-ray won via payola more than popularity or technical superiority. HDDVD has way better error correction and thus longevity, but you can see why corpos wouldn’t want that at the peak of the planned obsolescence / e-waste years.
The PS3 including a BD drive certainly played a part though.
MS tried to push HD-DVD but required a separate device to use it on 360.
It feels like that was the generation of poor console decisions.
Are we past said peak, then?
I hope those that are iffy about the jump away from microsoft look at valves steam machine and realize they can also use it for more than games. Make a smooth transition from oh this thing only does games to oh I can use it as my PC.
Most people don’t even need a PC these days. They use the phone for everything. There is an entire market of people who have windows pc purely to play games, and nothing else. That’s ripe for the taking.
When recently onboarding for a new job I heard something I never thought I would hear in my life.
Everyone was given a Mac. Eng, design, finance, HR. Everyone. In my onboarding cohort, someone in finance asked if they could have a Windows PC, which has been the backbone of finance orgs for decades. IT said no. They just didn’t want to deal with Microsoft’s enterprise ecosystem.
Not finance but I always bring this up when ppl argue about android vs iPhone.
Tons and tons of businesses prefer the Apple ecosystem because it just fucking works.
Although, in the v26 operating systems, cracks are showing. A lot of IT orgs are holding off on Tahoe for as long as possible.
When I started at my current job, every new hire was given the choice of a MacBook or Linux laptop. I only encountered one person who chose the former and he only chose that because he thought it’d be funny to use Windows on a MacBook in his professional environment. (We were allowed to do pretty much whatever with our laptops so long as we could fulfill our work duties. My then manager replaced Ubuntu, with which we were provided, with Arch on his laptop.)
Two or so years later, the IT department said that they didn’t really know how to maintain security compliance on Linux, but they did know JAMF. Thus, they took away our customizable Linux laptops and foisted MacBooks on all of us. I’m pretty sure even the Windows guy lost that, but he was an exec so it probably took longer.
I still remember when they announced that this would happen. They said it without a timeline in the company-wide group chat and someone I respected previously and respected more afterwards said “so when are you taking away our good laptops?”
My guess that they’re trying to standardize around a platform that has a) no Microsoft, b) won’t cause product / UX / marketing to totally revolt, c) is well supported as an engineering platform (in Silicon Valley)
As someone who went through this, I would honestly take Window 11’s bs over pos unusable mac.
First time ever I think I felt pain in my wrist from using a trackpad. Absolute clownshow of a UX
Interesting. I’ve got of gripes with Apple hardware (price, upgradability, silly things like notches and Touch Bars,) but trackpads has never been one of them. I’ve always thought the’ve had some of the best trackpads.
What trackpad do you prefer and why?
Oh no the trackpad itself is actually pretty okay. Its the fact that I have to drag a ridiculous length for the subsequent input to match on screen, even with the highest sensitivity setting.
Apple’s ingenious design was to make the trackpad feel like a 1:1 representation of your display, which is why its so huge.
And since way too much stuff in MacOS is functional around mouse clicks, I was constantly swiping all over the place for basic functions.
I think apple users kind of got used to using only their arm, but thats hard for me to do since I’m used to regular old trackpads and mice.
EDIT: Comparatively, I’m fine one something like a thinkpad or even a very cheap HP notebook, so long as the OS or Application UX is cool enough to keep things sensible.
Weird. I never noticed that. I bump mine up a bit from the default, but I don’t max it out. That’s way too fast for me to handle.
I do know there are ton of apps that will override the defaults. I think the OG better touch tool will let you max that thing to warp speed.
That’s nice to see actually. Regular consumers like us don’t have any pull, but businesses do. So I hope more start seeing Microsoft problematic enough to start shifting away to MacOS to get Microsoft to reassess their decisions.
I don’t know if Apple’s shenanigans are much better with how they’re trying to lock it down
Trying? Have you used a recent version of MacOS?
Shit is locked down as tight as they can get without preventing the ability to be used for development.
I fear Microsoft will simply not reassess their decisions and we’ll be stuck with Apple, who has historically been much worse about user freedom.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide it is because they don’t have even more AI stuff for every single task that their OS isn’t liked more and start shoving in AI into even mouse clicks with “helpful” copilot trying to predict if you are clicking to click or copy and paste.
I got the same treatment recently. All tech departments were issued M4 Mac Book Pros because that was more cost effective than than dealing with the non-compliant fuckery of W11. Unfortunately non-tech departments got the old inventory and are suffering the abhorrent instability of W11. It somehow refuses to play nice with just about everything in our corporate ecosystem.
But macOS is even more locked down than windows?
IMHO, it depends on the company, their data retention and security policy, and what you mean by “locked down.”
I’ve had IT departments that are comfortable giving everyone admin accounts and full sharing access, and IT departments that control every little thing that goes in and out of your machine.
They specifically mentioned the enterprise ecosystem.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple’s MDM system is less painful to use for smaller businesses than Microsoft’s AD and everything attached to it. Hell it might even be nicer for big orgs, but I’ve never heard of one (apart from the likes of Google) not using AD
Also if you’re already dealing with one of those systems, an IT department is probably motivated to not run both and set up interop if they can avoid it
Used to work for Apple in B2B sales.
Granted, this was five years ago, but back then it was sort of the other way round. The deployment at SMB scale worked really well and was also free of charge.
AT enterprise you would need a third-party solution typically, something like JAMF.
Locked down would probably be a plus for enterprise.
But honestly I’ve never got that argument. In what way is macOS more locked down than Windows? In the hardware that it will run on yes. But for the average user it seems fairly similar on the being “locked down” front.
I mean the hardware thing is huge imo
Sure, but for say the average laptop buyer nowadays not really.
True, but enterprise hardware has never been something that IT departments really wanted to upgrade. Even back when everyone had upgradable towers under their desk, IT departments just wanted to kit you out with something that lasted 3 years, then was replaced.
Hell, in the before times, when I’ve even wanted more storage, all of my IT departments were more inclined to give me an external HD than open a computer case. They’re busy and they generally want to do whatever is fast.
Can you install linux on a mac?
Older Intel Macs are some of the best Linux machines. The newer ones with Apple CPUs are a compatibility nightmare.
Yes. And Windows too, on the x86 ones. Those are no different than a traditional laptop.
If you can get an old final-intel-gen MBP in decent nick, they can make pretty decent Linux machines if you’re okay with not being able to do any internal hardware upgrades.
tiny-dfr is your friend if you happen to get one with that touchbar F-row, which is probably the only big downside compared to a conventional laptop.
Yup
No, more people need to go to Linux or something else that’s not win or mac
