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.
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.
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.
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).