There’s a dangerous bet going on right now that doesn’t make the most sense.
It’s Microsoft.
I just don’t really understand their game right now. They’re still playing like every card in the game is in their hand and they have nothing to lose, so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
It’s almost as if Microsoft and every other hardware and mainstream software developer is secretly betting on the loss of private home computing. It’s almost as if in the longrun, they aren’t worried about our choices.
These Linux wins all over the place are cool and all, but the lack of any sweat whatsoever from these bozos has me on edge. Wtf is their game? From AAA gaming to your email client, it’s all getting worse and they know it, they just keep doubling down.
What if that’s they don’t care, as they’re the evil empire.
It reminded me that scene in Andor (2022) in the first season, episode 9, ‘nobody’s listening’ the protagonist says they’re not listening to prisoners as they don’t care, so much they don’t believe they can lose their domination. You have to be in the context of the show (which I highly recommend, if you like the Star Wars universe) to get the reference. But I think that could be the case here.
Microsoft may not care, not because they know something, but rather the opposite. Them being pedo oligarchs not really caring much. Perhaps they’re still into the illusion Linux is some very niche thing for dorks.
I have an interesting story about it (I’d write it in my blog, it’s somewhat long). If in a few words, at my kid’s school, they (a few teachers) have a very old PC that struggles with Windows (also, It’s HDD there), so I reinstalled Linux there. Prior, I asked what they use. ‘Not much really’ was the reply, and so I explored, and diagnosed it’s just browser (which was obsolete and couldn’t be updated), Word, and Explorer (files manager). Not much else.
Sure thing, Linux can do all of them many times better!
I picked Fedora Silverblue (that’s the atomic version with Gnome) thinking it’s so much better than the KDE version, as it’s simpler. It’s not more complex than Chrome OS. My mistake, even advertising it as a macOS (good, right?) clone did not help, they were terrified. The very next day I rebased it to KDE, and applied some Windows 11 theme. It was very similar in its looks. They said ‘OK, we’d try to use it’ but the very next day they asked me to bring their system back. (I never erased it, just swapped their HDD with my SSD.)
I gave up, perhaps quite quickly, but I have no resources to push them at the moment. For you to understand, their computer switched from being very noisy to being so silent I was asking (every day while it was with Linux, like 3 or 4 days in total) whether it’s on or not. Back to Windows, and it’s super noisy back again. The difference was night and day. Right now, the machine boots within like 5 minutes. A couple of minutes to desktop, and a few minutes for it to become usable. With the SSD and Linux, half a minute tops. And when it’s booted, it’s pretty much instant.
browser is the same, but updated
Word is Libre Office Writer, which is simpler. They don’t use it heavily, so it should work for them. I set it to save the files as docx. The icon is from MS Word.
file manager is many times simpler visually, yet million times more advanced. A Linux user would surely know the difference, especially given Microslop did theirs in Electron, lol.
Yet, they were afraid of Linux. Perhaps, my mistake was stressing that. Maybe I should have Only Office installed (is it more alike? Haven’t used it for many years), and invest some time into tuning the theme to be identical, it had some minor difference. And tell them that’s Windows 11, and I just updated their system. I don’t know. Their concern was they didn’t know how to work with it, not even trying. I explicitly offered to babysit them for a few days, to help them adapt, but they refused.
Perhaps, I should have tried Zorin, if it’s more similar visually. But I have no experience of it, so I’m not sure.
Apart from that, I believe Linux is more than ready to be a desktop OS, it has everything needed, or almost everything. Only some software is lacking, I’d say.
Doesn’t matter how many people switch at home, MS has the business segment captured, and until one Linux distro decides to target this, it won’t change.
And then there’s everything that’s built around Office, especially Excel. No OSS comes close to Excel at the business level, and attempting to make an OSS app work there costs so much in time that it’s simply not worth it.
Now running servers and services - what do you think VMware ESXi is but a Linux Kernel with a management layer on top?
Proxmox - Probably best competitor to ESXi is just Linux KVM with a lot of great capability added to it, just like XCPNG.
But for a desktop, there’s simply no comparison. Plus you have a workforce that’s well experienced with windows. If you lose 1 hour a week per person due to switching, that’s a metric shitload off lost productivity.
I remember a time when IBM had 95% market share of the PC market.
Then Apple and Microsoft innovated them out of the market, in software.
Blackberry had 80%+ market share of the smartphone segment they popularized. In 4 years it was almost entirely gone.
It happens when the engineers are sidelined and the finance and marketing people take over.
They are blind to any trends that they do not control. They are unable to innovate and unwilling to take risks. It kills gigantic companies slowly at first and then very quickly.
so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
Oh, you know it, you just don’t want it to be true. Every business out there knows it too. The age of consumerism driven growth is gone, killed by the ever growing financial gaps between the layers of society in all western world. There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation). The products that are marketed are not the products that are needed for the companies to make money off of.
This shift might not be as visible with IT companies, but look at more obvious examples: even fucking McDonald’s has stopped going after customers needing affordable meals and is going after fewer but richer customers. So do hotels. So do airlines. And yes, so do IT companies.
In the case of Microsoft, they have a lot of experience with fucking over low end consumers and then bouncing back too. They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s. They know they can afford to alienate customers for long periods of time with no lasting issues
My prediction is that by 2040, Windows and your entire online existence as a… “normie” will be encapsulated within walled gardens via client access almost entirely.
Those of us still able to host anything will be doing it with ebay finds and crowsourced parts.
…but this is but one of my many branching possible timelines, maybe we get the “America goes KEN mode” timeline, “Mother nature rolls her sleeves up” or the “Humanity finally stands up for itself and realizes a leftist/socialist utopia” timelines. There’s always the “China sics robot dogs with machineguns on everyone” timeline.
Microsoft isn’t exactly doing anything new. It’s the same strategy that’s worked for them forever ago:
Get kids used to Microsoft products by vendor locking K-12 schools with cheap contracts.
Monetize those kids when they graduate (they never had privacy to begin with, so there is little pushback) and hope they don’t switch to Apple’s subsidized MacBooks in college.
When all else fails, lean heavily on corporate contracts, since corporations can’t change their ecosystem set up 40 years ago.
Linux wins factor very little in the equation… and anyone switching to Linux is quickly replaced by the next kid who has had a Microsoft Windows keyboarding class every year since age 9.
I imagine that they don’t care for the small segment of users that can install another OS. Even if they stay at Windows we probably hamper and sabotage the telemetry/adware parts of the OS and become less profitable.
Well, for one they and their buddies can make new consumer PCs as closed as phones are. Old hardware will eventually run out if they’ll keep the cartel knit tight enough.
Besides that, there is a slow but steady push to get rid of cash. Once it’s gone, the only convenient way to use money for regular people will be digital banking. I think tech buddies won’t have a hard time convincing bank buddies and gov buddies that any device/system not coming from authorized corpo is not safe to support. It would make those resisting assimilate, or quickly fall to the society’s bottom.
It’s already happening. Google’s device attestation means that apps can insist you run a signed OS (signed by Google, or an authorized partner) or refuse to work. I use GrapheneOS and because of this, I can’t tap to pay or use my phone as a car key. No chance they’ll ever allow GrapheneOS to join that program because it undermines their data collection and control.
There’s a dangerous bet going on right now that doesn’t make the most sense.
It’s Microsoft.
I just don’t really understand their game right now. They’re still playing like every card in the game is in their hand and they have nothing to lose, so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
It’s almost as if Microsoft and every other hardware and mainstream software developer is secretly betting on the loss of private home computing. It’s almost as if in the longrun, they aren’t worried about our choices.
These Linux wins all over the place are cool and all, but the lack of any sweat whatsoever from these bozos has me on edge. Wtf is their game? From AAA gaming to your email client, it’s all getting worse and they know it, they just keep doubling down.
What if that’s they don’t care, as they’re the evil empire.
It reminded me that scene in Andor (2022) in the first season, episode 9, ‘nobody’s listening’ the protagonist says they’re not listening to prisoners as they don’t care, so much they don’t believe they can lose their domination. You have to be in the context of the show (which I highly recommend, if you like the Star Wars universe) to get the reference. But I think that could be the case here.
Microsoft may not care, not because they know something, but rather the opposite. Them being pedo oligarchs not really caring much. Perhaps they’re still into the illusion Linux is some very niche thing for dorks.
I have an interesting story about it (I’d write it in my blog, it’s somewhat long). If in a few words, at my kid’s school, they (a few teachers) have a very old PC that struggles with Windows (also, It’s HDD there), so I reinstalled Linux there. Prior, I asked what they use. ‘Not much really’ was the reply, and so I explored, and diagnosed it’s just browser (which was obsolete and couldn’t be updated), Word, and Explorer (files manager). Not much else.
Sure thing, Linux can do all of them many times better!
I picked Fedora Silverblue (that’s the atomic version with Gnome) thinking it’s so much better than the KDE version, as it’s simpler. It’s not more complex than Chrome OS. My mistake, even advertising it as a macOS (good, right?) clone did not help, they were terrified. The very next day I rebased it to KDE, and applied some Windows 11 theme. It was very similar in its looks. They said ‘OK, we’d try to use it’ but the very next day they asked me to bring their system back. (I never erased it, just swapped their HDD with my SSD.)
I gave up, perhaps quite quickly, but I have no resources to push them at the moment. For you to understand, their computer switched from being very noisy to being so silent I was asking (every day while it was with Linux, like 3 or 4 days in total) whether it’s on or not. Back to Windows, and it’s super noisy back again. The difference was night and day. Right now, the machine boots within like 5 minutes. A couple of minutes to desktop, and a few minutes for it to become usable. With the SSD and Linux, half a minute tops. And when it’s booted, it’s pretty much instant.
Yet, they were afraid of Linux. Perhaps, my mistake was stressing that. Maybe I should have Only Office installed (is it more alike? Haven’t used it for many years), and invest some time into tuning the theme to be identical, it had some minor difference. And tell them that’s Windows 11, and I just updated their system. I don’t know. Their concern was they didn’t know how to work with it, not even trying. I explicitly offered to babysit them for a few days, to help them adapt, but they refused.
Perhaps, I should have tried Zorin, if it’s more similar visually. But I have no experience of it, so I’m not sure.
Apart from that, I believe Linux is more than ready to be a desktop OS, it has everything needed, or almost everything. Only some software is lacking, I’d say.
Business. The End.
Doesn’t matter how many people switch at home, MS has the business segment captured, and until one Linux distro decides to target this, it won’t change.
And then there’s everything that’s built around Office, especially Excel. No OSS comes close to Excel at the business level, and attempting to make an OSS app work there costs so much in time that it’s simply not worth it.
Now running servers and services - what do you think VMware ESXi is but a Linux Kernel with a management layer on top?
Proxmox - Probably best competitor to ESXi is just Linux KVM with a lot of great capability added to it, just like XCPNG.
But for a desktop, there’s simply no comparison. Plus you have a workforce that’s well experienced with windows. If you lose 1 hour a week per person due to switching, that’s a metric shitload off lost productivity.
It’s called incumbency.
I remember a time when IBM had 95% market share of the PC market.
Then Apple and Microsoft innovated them out of the market, in software.
Blackberry had 80%+ market share of the smartphone segment they popularized. In 4 years it was almost entirely gone.
It happens when the engineers are sidelined and the finance and marketing people take over.
They are blind to any trends that they do not control. They are unable to innovate and unwilling to take risks. It kills gigantic companies slowly at first and then very quickly.
Oh, you know it, you just don’t want it to be true. Every business out there knows it too. The age of consumerism driven growth is gone, killed by the ever growing financial gaps between the layers of society in all western world. There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation). The products that are marketed are not the products that are needed for the companies to make money off of.
This shift might not be as visible with IT companies, but look at more obvious examples: even fucking McDonald’s has stopped going after customers needing affordable meals and is going after fewer but richer customers. So do hotels. So do airlines. And yes, so do IT companies.
In the case of Microsoft, they have a lot of experience with fucking over low end consumers and then bouncing back too. They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s. They know they can afford to alienate customers for long periods of time with no lasting issues
ya got me! I knew
My prediction is that by 2040, Windows and your entire online existence as a… “normie” will be encapsulated within walled gardens via client access almost entirely.
Those of us still able to host anything will be doing it with ebay finds and crowsourced parts.
…but this is but one of my many branching possible timelines, maybe we get the “America goes KEN mode” timeline, “Mother nature rolls her sleeves up” or the “Humanity finally stands up for itself and realizes a leftist/socialist utopia” timelines. There’s always the “China sics robot dogs with machineguns on everyone” timeline.
Hell, maybe a blend, idk.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s. The only blend I know of is the coffee. (J)
Microsoft isn’t exactly doing anything new. It’s the same strategy that’s worked for them forever ago:
Get kids used to Microsoft products by vendor locking K-12 schools with cheap contracts.
Monetize those kids when they graduate (they never had privacy to begin with, so there is little pushback) and hope they don’t switch to Apple’s subsidized MacBooks in college.
When all else fails, lean heavily on corporate contracts, since corporations can’t change their ecosystem set up 40 years ago.
Linux wins factor very little in the equation… and anyone switching to Linux is quickly replaced by the next kid who has had a Microsoft Windows keyboarding class every year since age 9.
What are you going to do? Not use Microsoft Excel? It’s got Copilot now. I don’t see Libreoffice coming with AI. AI costs money!
I imagine that they don’t care for the small segment of users that can install another OS. Even if they stay at Windows we probably hamper and sabotage the telemetry/adware parts of the OS and become less profitable.
When looking at their Q4 earnings the Windows and Devices and Advertisement revenue should be high enough to warrant some effort. That effort is probably to increase the Advertisement revenue though.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2025-q4/segment-revenues
Well, for one they and their buddies can make new consumer PCs as closed as phones are. Old hardware will eventually run out if they’ll keep the cartel knit tight enough.
Besides that, there is a slow but steady push to get rid of cash. Once it’s gone, the only convenient way to use money for regular people will be digital banking. I think tech buddies won’t have a hard time convincing bank buddies and gov buddies that any device/system not coming from authorized corpo is not safe to support. It would make those resisting assimilate, or quickly fall to the society’s bottom.
It’s already happening. Google’s device attestation means that apps can insist you run a signed OS (signed by Google, or an authorized partner) or refuse to work. I use GrapheneOS and because of this, I can’t tap to pay or use my phone as a car key. No chance they’ll ever allow GrapheneOS to join that program because it undermines their data collection and control.
Sunk cost?