Comment by TheRoque
7 days ago
I wonder what's their endgame. I mean, if it keeps getting worse, at some point they will really bleed users.
Even if for now the stats (e.g. steam hardware survey), show only a slight increase in Linux users (and a lot of them could be dual booting)
> a lot of them could be dual booting
I should have a valid license for windows, my Win 8 Pro license (which I paid full price for, like $150) should have worked for Windows 10 (and then transfered to 11) but it's not working anymore for whatever reason, I probably upgraded without disabling the key somewhere or whatever. So when I use Windows I have that "activation required" nag watermark now. When microsoft finally remotely kills my unactivated windows 10 install (a week from now? 6 months?) I'm just not going back. The only reason I dual boot these days is fusion 360 CAD and there's a steam install on there so it's probably showing up as a windows install even though I haven't played games on there in probably years.
Windows will probably continue on forever simply due to inertia but this "you have to have a web login to use your private computer" b.s. is going to turn off a lot of consumers, and this will be the watershed moment where Proton/Wine finally moves from 5, to 10 or 15% of users
Try the internet without an adblocker. The typical user will put up with a lot of pain.
So will the typical developer these days, unfortunately.
> what's their endgame
Cloud-based profit. The "computer user" model is dead.
right, "everything is a monthly or annual license or we want none of it" is where they are headed. Cloud makes that even easier.
This is the reason. The rent-to-compute model is being pushed so hard.
We should unite and start pushing back, against MS and this general anti-consumer push towards forcing a subscription model on everything, I will never rent a computer, never pay such a subscription, go fuck yourselves corporate goons ans stakeholders.
Keep milking the cash cows to pay for the new growth area (AI). Convert maximum % of Windows users into subscription service consumers (e.g. cloud storage, Office 365, future paid AI capabilities.)
Also, they haven't cared about Windows 11 consumer sales for decades. It's not a coincidence that it's easier to crack Windows 11 than it was to crack Windows XP.
Microsoft's cloud/AI services are high-margin and lock users into a subscription, i.e. a consistent revenue stream. Windows is to be a marketing/cross-selling channel for those businesses first and foremost.
They very likely foresee the demise of PC as a platform altogether and are trying their best to shepherd us into their other products.
I'm not sure anyone at Microsoft has any endgame in mind for Windows. The devs are just working on what they're being told to work on, which aren't the parts conducive to happy consumers, while the execs are working on instinct and telemetry without context, and thus are basically flailing with no actual goal in mind beyond the next quarter. Add in that there's little hope for Windows' market share to increase in any large way, and that there thus isn't much reason to spend loads of money or dev time on improving Windows, and there's no wonder that we've come to this point.
The endgame is obviously to sell you Office 365, and Xbox Game Pass. Every Windows user who isn't giving them ARR equals one skeptical eyebrow from wall street.
The endgame is to eliminate legacy support options. Dedicated phone lines for activation costs money. The overwhelming majority of people using Windows 11 have access to some form/time of internet.
This is also just for activation which is not required to use Windows 11. I don't understand the extreme reactions to this. This isn't 2001 anymore.
Windows is absolutely insufferable now. Offensive, defective, regressive, clumsy, slow garbage.
I 100% agree, I dual boot myself and get reminded on how horrible the user experience is as opposed to Fedora with KDE Plasma
I had to return to Windows for my job, and it's appalling how many basic functions are now MISSING. For example: Try selecting two or more PNGs in Explorer and opening them in Photoshop (or whatever). YOU CAN'T. "Open with" is simply missing from the context menu if you have multiple files selected.
This functionality was taken for granted 30+ years ago!
I boot to Linux, but have a Windows 11 VM. I haven't spun up the Windows VM more than once a month for many months (maybe a year?). And that's just to update windows.
1 reply →
Replace personal PCs with thin clients that give you an RDP session to Azure? I'm pretty sure a cloud only / subscription based "agentic" OS is the goal for windows. And, conveniently, hardware prices are through the roof until (hopefully) the AI bubble pops.
This - they already renamed remote desktop to Windows App on my work Mac so the next step is just offering "secure computing environmens" for their corporate customers.
you will not own a computer, you will lease them, via a terminal.
and you will like it. so says MS.
They’re using their legacy OS and Office business to subsidize services (LinkedIn, GitHub, npm, vscode, teams, azure, etc).
Consider what our industry will look like once the surveillance as a service/enshittifcation that’s been implemented for windows is ported to those things.
Try switching away from the services I mentioned, and you’ll see why the strategy makes sense.