putting aside that 12% is still a fair bit, I wonder how much value it brings them in more intangible ways, that would only become obvious if they "lost" windows.
Developer mindshare. There are a huge amount of developers who want Windows (or really Visual Studio proper), and there is a meticulously tarred highway from Windows to Azure.
The irony is that this bullshit will drive developers away, because they are some of the least likely to put up with it.
> There are a huge amount of developers who want Windows
I watched rabid Windows fans that had been developing for many years slowly become disappointed apologists during the decade of 2010. They still use Windows and trust .NET and SQL Server, but they have had their joy slowly beaten out of them by Microsoft’s change of focus.
Balmer yelling “Developers developers developers” on stage in 2000 was a sign of how important developers used to be to the company.
I think Microsoft should get back to their roots and create a Windows Developer Edition for individuals & small businesses: remove all the consumer shit, fix the tasteless look, pre-install developer tools, charge $100 per year for it (with discounts to onboard anyone developing targeting Windows OS). Nice if they could come up with a GUI to compete with Electron (or at least an HTML slimmed down with inefficient features removed?). They need another VB6 too! (Disclaimer: I’ve not really used VB6). Pushing your developers into the arms of Apple Mac’s seems like a poor long-term strategy.
I know this will never happen, but I wish that they would go even a step further than that:
I wish they would admit that, for better or worse, Linux is the desktop to corral around. A proprietary OS for BYO hardware is very simply a Bad Idea, both in terms of developers (because you're at the mercy of the OS developer's documentation only) and in terms of users (because software will always theoretically be more stable on an OS that a developer can crack open).
So, rather than creating a Windows Developer Edition and charging for it, I would love to see them sunset Windows into a legacy/Enterprise-only OS that they charge a hefty fee for. And then I'd love to see them build a Linux distro that deeply interops with their services (i.e. their real money-makers) that they release for free.
This new "Windows" would be the new OS that comes pre-installed on laptops by HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. It could look essentially the same -- perhaps their desktop environment could be called Glass (get it?) -- and it could still run win32 apps via Wine (which they would be a massive contributor to in this fantasy world of mine). A headless version could of course be available for servers running Azure. Etc etc etc.
They could charge for support (i.e. the FOSS playbook that's been pushed the 70s). They could of course continue to create proprietary apps and modules that they charge for, I don't care -- for example, a CoreAudio/CoreMIDI competitor that only audio professionals would really need. I'm not naive enough to think that proprietary/non-free software will ever go away, but the OS is simply not the place for that. Platforms of all kinds benefit from being FOSS.
I know that there's a great kernel down there, but Windows is just a mess. Just kill the damn thing. Let it die. I ran Windows 11 since it was released and recently switched back to 10 because 11 is just so unbearably bad, and I still only use Windows at all as little as possible, only when I have to for certain work.
None of this will ever happen of course, but a man can dream.
>> I'd love to see them build a Linux distro that deeply interops with their services (i.e. their real money-makers) that they release for free.
>> This new "Windows" would be the new OS that comes pre-installed on laptops by HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. It could look essentially the same -- perhaps their desktop environment could be called Glass (get it?) -- and it could still run win32 apps via Wine (which they would be a massive contributor to in this fantasy world of mine). A headless version could of course be available for servers running Azure. Etc etc etc.
They created their own derivative of the Chrome browser, so why not create their own derivative of ChromeOS that does what you are saying? :)
LOL since 2010 I've watched windows laptops disappear and mac laptops appear in pretty much every department i visit EXCEPT finance. There is exactly one engineer on my team that still uses windows but he admits that it's just inertia. Every piece of software he uses regularly either exists on linux/mac or can be replaces quite easily on linux/mac with no loss in productivity. Hell he spends most of his time in windows ACTUALLY in the linux subsystem.
I still have a single windows box and it's more or less a game console at this point and since getting a steamdeck I'm not sure it makes a ton of sense to keep it. Steamdeck+ps5 probably gives me all the gaming I want with less hassle.
I have a gaming box too, but recently noticed that Minecraft is much faster on Linux, hence I installed Linux along. Still most of games are on windows, but this is old laptop and I don't have time to test them and move to Linux.
