Windows hit its lowest market share in decades, Microsoft lost $400 billion in a week, and now their own president is admitting they need to fix the OS. SteamOS and Linux aren’t waiting around.
On my websites I see 90-95 percents mobile traffic. There is just no desktop usage anymore.
Since Ms lost mobile game , - I can only imagine they are loosing badly now as Linux can absolute easily replace it. Can’t wait for oems shipping it.So, I can believe Windows is falling apart; I’m less sure of real indications that “Microsoft is panicking” though. I think the newest pie charts I saw of their revenue showed they weren’t really so specifically dependent on Windows. It helps to sell their other cloud platforms, sure, but it doesn’t seem so critical they sell home PCs anymore. Maybe I could be wrong and someone can correct me.
Don’t get me wrong, I moved my gaming PC off Windows late last year, I’m happy to end the toxic relationship, just predicting what’s going to happen next.
Their direct Revenue from Windows is not a main concern since I think it was something like 20% as you said. The problem though is that their cloud and enterprise offerings rely on the fact that businesses buy into the Windows platform.
Absolute garbage tier software like Teams, modern O365, AD, Azure, etc only sells because its built on Windows. If MSFT loses the home market, businesses have a high chance of following, especially since their QA process relies exclusively on home users.
Companies like RedHat and OpenSUSE already provide such services and plenty of smaller or newer clients have trialed or switched user-end desktop machines over to linux.
All they really need is to reach maybe 10% desktop market share, and MSFT would start facing a slaughter in the coming years as big OEMs start shipping linux from factory.
Anyone who isn’t heavily vendor locked would probably take the chance, especially if they don’t even rely on any Windows specific functionality for work.
But yeah as you said, good riddance. Windows has been such a trash experience for me ever since 8. They ignored all the critical issues and complaints on the stupid insider hub, and then doubled down on ruining the OS further in 10 and 11.
Good point about critical mass. It doesn’t need to take 50%. You know, and the fact that windows is not as gateable as mobile platforms. There are 2-3 reasonable alternatives so it’s much harder to stop the bleed. I wish we had alternatives on mobile
I think O365 is a bigger lockin than anything else. But you are right that AD/Entra, for example, is pretty much only because they also have the desktop market locked up. To the extent anyone bothers with Windows Server, which is almost no one anyway, it’s only because the desktop market, so that slice is at risk.
So you have Excel/Powerpoint as the biggest lockins for them outside of Windows itself, but Azure is broadly considered an acceptable choice alongside AWS or GCE, and your cloud provider selection tends to be pretty vendor locked pretty much instantly.
Of course, the bigger threat to them on the “desktop” is not so much RedHat/Ubuntu/SUSE as much as it is Android/iOS.
Not about Windows 11, but another discussion where laptops are infeasibly expensive this year drove some people to report that their companies have begun moving technicians they formerly required to use a laptop to tablets and phones. Having a tablet-in-a-laptop form factor with Aluminium flavor of Android may be an attractive option between hardware costs and Windows 11 nonsense piling on top of long-term Windows desktop nonsense (companies pay microsoft and several security companies to try to wallpaper over security, and Android/iOS are very appealing for their more restrictive privilege model).
I think they are panicking because of the stock price reaction.
I suggest they increase all their AI investment by 10X and pour some real gasoline on that fire.
They may. No one has ever made a financial bubble this big. They could totally dump everything into AI and then some. Maybe something absolutely brain dead like buy hardware with a 3 year lifespan by issuing a 100 year bond
In case no one caught your reference that indeed, Google issued a hundred year bond for this bubble build out. Which is of course crazy as either it pops and is a waste, or continues and they need to issue more debt with 97 years left on the bond they already issued…
We need some bored individual to put up a leaderboard of sorts. We’ve all been seeing some real stunning moves in the game of “wreck this immortal golden god of a company” - too much to keep up with honestly, these dorks are just as impactful as they always imagined! Who knew.
We’re over here watching the fucking Olympics of ignorant greedy douchery and we never even had medals made 😩
Microsoft has been built on a 40 year old tech monopoly under which is has fully leveraged abusive anti-consumer and anti-user tactics that have kept it there. It’s amazing they have lasted this long while accreting so much hate. This greed, their creepy starry-eyed cult-like adoption of LLMs, and the destruction of user trust by the outright THEFT of user data will be their downfall. You simply cannot vibe code a good operating system.
Watching one of the largest corporations ever conceived BEG users to use OneDrive and Edge, then surreptitiously change settings and install software to make it so is mind boggling. They simply cannot STAND that you won’t let them train models on your data, glowing bright green with envy at Google and Apple’s closed hardware systems.
I’ll say it again and again, I would have happily paid for Windows 10, but they gave it away for free, then marched an unwilling user base to 11 only for it to be the worst OS since Windows Vista. Extreme wealth breeds insanity.
You simply cannot vibe code a good operating system.
Hell, they weren’t doing too well before that, either. The whole creepy “we know better” vibe was pretty noticeable before the advent of LLMs too - although of course it’s made it a ton worse. But they were always inept and douchy to boot.
As the joke goes, “Do you think Microsoft understands consent? Yes / Maybe yes later”
(Personally I think 11 is way worse than Vista - in isolation, relative to the previous one, morally, somehow UX wise, pretty much any metric you want.)
I have to agree. Vista was a dud, but there were a number of legitimate improvements made over Windows XP. Windows 11 is just a worse Windows 10. Other than maybe tabs in the Explorer, I can’t think of anything they’ve improved and a whole lot they made worse.
Exactly. Vista was rushed and buggy but that’s, y’know, par for the course really. I think there was a time in the 00’s where they really wanted to be extremely optimistic about Moore’s law-style performance gains, and for some reason they thought they could aim ahead of the curve. Cue Vista actually running like dogshit even aside from outright crashes and such.
Vista could easily be made into a normal gray Windows experience
Vista and 8.1 were my favorite Windows versions since XP.
You sick bastard.
The day they killed off Windows Phone is they day I knew that there were no more devs left in the c-suite and that they were on a slow path to spinning off what’s left of their profitability.
Windows phone was kinda good. I liked the UI
xbox is a dumpster fire too
Windows 11 was just supposed to be Windows 10 with just an UI change and some more features, but with the slop code it’s become extremely annoying.
Last October my work PC was “upgraded” to windows 11… All the menus are wrong, nothing works like it should, and it keeps trying to get me to poison the air by using copilot. At home I use Linux Mint and it’s amazing. The only thing I’ve tried to do on Mint that it wouldn’t do is play one video game I have called Cosmoteer. Which is strange because I have a lot more complex programs and games that run fine.
Mint has been all i have run since the end of last year. Only thing i had to open windows for was ableton live, i cant get it to install in any wine emulator i have tried. I followed guides but nothing has worked so far.
Otherwise i love using it and everything else works. Mostly out of the box.
You might be able to downgrade to windows 10 and get extra security updates until October. I’ve been lazy and have continued using my old windows install using the outdated file structure, so Windows said I was ineligible to upgrade to 11 and gave it to me for free.
2026, the year of the Linux desktop!
Don’t let your memes be dreams
But no really it might finally be, and soon
I’ve already been dipping my toe in the Linux water with my Steam Deck. If Windows gets so bad than even I am willing to go through the extra effort of completely switching to Linux, they’re doomed.
Do it. Honestly, it’s hardly an effort these days
Windows for me is a battle these days. I have linux machines I check once every week or two unless I get a email from them. I have to constantly check all of my deployed windows machines to make sure co pilot hasn’t snuck back in. Microsoft has no respect for privacy at all. This isn’t a new development but now they just can’t be bothered to pretend anymore.
I ran this script to remove copilot and it installs a stub update to make it appear its still installed so M$ won’t try again… working so far.
I ran this on every machine
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
It keeps reappearing on machines at random. I don’t have to time to run down how I just keep it dead on login for each user.
Try their cloud services, they’re hilariously buggy and bad. I’m forced to use it daily, still, and gooooddd it’s so bad. Not an hour passes without at least multiple bugs.
They have no QA, there is no way
I used to work mostly with AWS and didn’t realise how good we had it. Then the company merged and we’re getting Azure contracts out the ass.
So many services work fine and look great when demoing them, but the moment you try to use them for anything but the most basic usecases they start buckling and ripping at the seams.
Definitely. Keeping an Azure virtual desktop host online for more than 3 days is just asking for problems.
I don’t have as many issues with SharePoint and OneDrive anymore, but I feel like a tool after windows runs updates and breaks shit that I have to tell users to reboot to fix it. Daily. If you don’t reboot once a week, windows actively starts fucking your shit up, and just plain stops working properly. Fucking hate it. Its such a pile of flaming shit.
Vibe QA
Not too different from how it worked for the last 40 years
“Hey Claude, this code is good right?”
“Your CEO has configured me to respond yes to that question”
Man Azure is such a pain in the ass
No wait! C’mon! Please! Write something in word! Ask copilot questions! Please! Just a few more weeks of stealing all your data! We’ll keep it safe! We promise! Oh but we have to let you know there has been a breach…now your screen is blue -here’s a completely useless code that you can input on your Linux PC to fix our shitty PC software!
Their stock seems to be doing a bit of a freefall lately:
Its still pretty high compared to just 5 years ago. But investors look to leverage future positions. So its interesting its going down at such a quick rate.
This isn’t because windows sucks, this is all the recoil from AI. MS invested over $13b in openai and holds about a quarter of the company.
Windows doesn’t make enough money for Microsoft to seriously care about it, their baby now is Azure.
Their big ticket money maker now is just Microsoft’s version of RHEL? RIP
Huh? RHEL isn’t a cloud. Azure is Microsoft’s version of aws / gcp
Isn’t azure the name of the linux spin running the HVM too?
I don’t know what you mean by Linux spin. Are you thinking of hyperv?
i could swear i remember reading their cloud was linux under the hood. Research time i suppose
Very well might be, but the end product is nothing like RHEL. I know they host more Linux than Windows on Azure.
I think a lot of EFT type investments are going to be divesting from AI-Bubble stocks over the next while.
“Install Linux, Problem Solved.”
Seriously, anyone who loves Linux should be setting up training seminars on how to use it, make it much friendlier and cost-free to use.
This has always been Linux’s barrier to entry, that smug attitude of “you’ve just got to learn it”. The majority of people don’t want to learn new things, the vast majority definitely don’t want to learn how to use a terminal.
There are some good low barrier distributions out there, but not many that “just work” for a user who uses their PC for multiple tasks.
Like SteamOS is wonderful if you’re just a gamer, valve has cracked that and made the UI nice and simple, but if you leave steam and launch the desktop it gets very complex very quickly. Hopefully valve continues to improve that experience.
I dunno i have put Mint on many computers including an 80 year old woman who just checks her email and news. No one ever has issues and i don’t get calls . I think Linux has a PR issue more than a “barrier” … I would say Mint “just works” great .
Mint works reasonably well out of the box, but there are always edge cases (weird hardware/missing drivers) that can throw a spanner into the works. Hopefully as Linux becomes more widely used, we’ll see hardware manufacturers release drivers and keep them up-to-date like they do with windows and Mac.
Not without proper insurance.
I’ve been using Linux since 93 and I love it. I’m confident enough to support my family’s machines, but there’s no way I’d offer more than basic advice to a stranger, let alone a group of them.
It would be nice if this served as a pointed lesson to stop putting useless, unwanted, invasive features and AI into things. Or at least to make them work.
Bread and circuses. It’s not complicated.
But what if we put AI in the kernel? 🤤 /s
Good will and user happiness are both resources that companies earn and spend. I doubt lessons being learned.
I think Microsoft may be overdrawn on that particular credit line.
Windows is a nightmare of turning wheels without reason. Access times to harddiscs are sometimes insultingly long. Linux is my way out except some software I use just isn’t released for Linux yet.
