Comment by coldpie
20 days ago
> It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.
Yeah, people forget that MS Office, and Excel and Outlook in particular, are the real foundation of Microsoft's vendor lock-in on the desktop.
Outlook is now basically an Electron app, they've deprecated the old desktop Outlook in favor of a port of the web app to desktop, so it's basically just Excel remaining.
Yeah, that's because Microsoft can see the writing on the wall. They don't want Windows to die, but they know the whole OS is at a point where it's probably inevitable that it will.
Developers don't want to use Windows anymore. They all want to run Linux because servers do. Ballmer was right about one thing: It was about the developers.
Microsoft can't compete with Chrome at the K-12 level. A Chromebook is a fraction of the cost at twice the runtime, so nobody is going to learn Windows growing up. There won't be a generation of new ready-trained Microsoft consumers every year.
And the average consumer? Oh, they're running an iPhone and maybe an iPad that's it. If Apple were really smart they'd have released an iPhone screencast dock, but Apple still thinks the iPhone doesn't need multiple user profiles. However, even with Apple's stupid behavior, they're losing their core consumer audience.
Steam is tired of Microsoft, too, so they're pushing for compatibility. Video games are either cross platform, console exclusive, or easy enough to emulate. If nVidia's graphics drivers weren't so proprietary, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult.
The big holdouts are the same people that kept COBOL a live programming language in the 21st century: The business office folks.
Microsoft has missed the boat on smartphones, tablets, budget laptops, smart TVs, video game consoles (which is a little surprising), server-side infrastructure, development, and now AI. Their market prospects right now are Millenials and older that don't want change, people who need exactly Excel or Outlook, and PC video gamers that aren't interested in change. Their best product is VS Code and it's free, their second best product (SQL Server) is pricing people out, and their third best product (.Net) is also free.
At this point I think they're mainly hoping Adobe doesn't jump ship.
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> Outlook is now basically an Electron app
And it's horrible.
Electron apps also basically don’t work in Wine. I miss having Evernote on Linux.
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Having worked in non-swe enterprise for two decades I would argue that this is less true today than it was 10 years ago. It used to be that new hires would come with a basic knowledge of windows and office, but that's no longer the case. At the same time, you have things like Smartsheets and so on, which are more popular, at least with our employees, than Excel and everyone seems to hate Outlook these days. I don't think it was ever really the case though. What Microsoft sells to enterprise is governance, and they really don't have any competition in this area.
Being in the European energy sector we're naturally looking into how we can replace every US tech product with an EU/FOSS one. It's actually relatively easy to buy the 365 experience through consultants which will setup a NextCloud, Libre/Only Office, Proton and a teams replacement I can't for the life of me remember the name of. Beneath it there is a mix of Identity Management systems, often based around Keycloak, at least for now. It works, from what we've seen in Germany (specificlaly with their military) it's also possible to roll it out relatively quickly. It's all the "other" stuff that gets murky. There isn't a real alternative to AD/Entra, yet, from a governance perspective. There are great tech solutions which does the same thing, but they require a lot of IT man hours. Something the public sector is always going to be more willing to deal with than the private sector. If we collectively decided that trains in Denmark should be free for passengers, then that would happen. You can't do that in a private business, though security obviously does factor into it.
This is the general story really. Microsoft's copilot studio is relatively new, and it's probably been flying under the radar in a lot of tech circles because it's basically what power automate always wished it could be. Having used it to build a HR flow, where an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones, create a teams site with files and the relevant people for the relevant applications, and invite the applicant to their first appointment. Well... I gotta say that I'm not sure what we have that's an alternative to that. It took me a couple of hours to build it, and it frankly works better than I thought it would. Granted, I did know the tool because I had previously done a PoC where I build a teams agent which "took over" my teams interactions. Everyone noticed because it spelled correctly and wasn't capable of posting Warhammer 40k ORK meme's in any form of quality, but it was frightenly easy. What Microsoft sells in this area is again the governance of it all. You can do these things because of how EntraID lets you connect services seamlessly with a few clicks. While behind the scenes all of those clicks are only available to you because your IT department control them... Again... without hundreds of manhours.
I'm sure we'll eventually get there, but it'll likely come down to change management. Because even if you're willing to retrain your IT operations crew, it's not likely that they will want to leave the Microsoft world where they are well paid and job-secure. Well, maybe I'm in a cheese bell, but I've never met an Azure/Microsoft IT person who would want to work with something else, and having been forced to work a little bit with it behind the scenes, I sort of get it... well not really.
Which boils down to why Microsoft has always been good with enterprise customers. The decision makers in your organisation will listen to everything, but their own IT departments will often sort of automatically recommend Microsoft products and at the end of the day, it'll all boil down to risk. Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff? (this isn't an actual question I'm asking, it's what goes through the considerations.)
This probably reflects my own prejudices, but it always struck me that MS based IT people wouldn’t work with anything else, basically because they couldn’t.
That stack optimises for not really having to understand what you’re doing, but also avoiding any major foot guns (and having the general arse covering that buying IBM used to provide, but which MS now does). The price you pay is that everything is horrible to work with. But if the alternative is not really being able to get anything done at all then so be it?
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> ...an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones...
You're probably breaking EU law by building this nightmare.
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/86/
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> Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff?
There's an old saying in IT that was pretty popular in the 70s and 80s: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
You'll notice that nobody says it anymore.
You're onto something but that's not entirely true for all games. There's plenty of vintage games, made before DirectX standardized everything into the late 90s, that don't work well under wine because back in their day, they would try to bypass windows by "hacking" their way to the hardware via unsupported APIs and hooks, to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware, and also because every hardware vendor back then from graphics to sound shipped their own APIs.
You mean dos games, just run them under a dos emulator then.
Oh, no, before everything kind of converged to OpenGL and DirectX, there were oodles of different things trying to be the next graphics API.
There are the more obvious ones like 3DFX/Glide, but there was also stuff like the Diamond Edge 3D, which used Sega Saturn style "quads".
NO, I meant Windows games.
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Office used to work well on WINE. It was the switch to a rolling release model that killed it.
So that's what's keeping Microsoft from just running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux or perhaps a clean slate kernel as their next OS. I've been wondering for a while, this is by far the best explanation.
The Windows Kernel (and arguably the Windows APIs) are the only good part of Windows; they should dump everything else and run Linux above it; wait they did do that and then changed it to a boring VM.
if you rip out linux from your linux distribution you usually end up with GNU.
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I was disappointed when Microsoft dropped original WSL.
I'll admit I wasn't a Windows user at the time, nor since for that matter. But I had been before.
I knew the history of the "Windows Services for UNIX" and thought that it was incredibly interesting to have the Windows kernel, full driver support, NTFS, and the ability to just use Windows normally, but also be able to just do UNIX-type stuff more or less normally.
Which is what I've been doing on my Mac since the early 2000s.
Then Microsoft had to make Windows a complete shit-show. Not like it hasn't happened before, but they really got themselves in deep this time.
> "running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux"
Like obsolete Longene project?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene
For games, part of that mere „output” is 3d graphics, so replicating the internals of Direct 3D exactly right and getting the Linux GPU drivers to cooperate. That’s a hardcore task.
Fun fact: MS Office also uses Direct3D :) See "Graphics" requirement here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/system-requiremen... We put a ton of effort into D3D11 specifically to get MS Office running.
Parts of the OS were designed for Office. (Windows installer service, for example)
> Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output.
They should be trivial to port then, no?
Yeah but Windows is a more stable api to develop against than Linux (at least when it comes to stuff that games need to do) - it doesn't feel "pure", but pragmatically it's much better as a game developer to just make sure the Windows version works with proton than it is to develop a native Linux version that's liable to break the second you stop maintaining it.
As someone once said it best, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
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Yes, they are easy to port a lot of the time. Especially now because you can use DXVK to translate DirectX calls into Vulkan, so you don't need to write a Vulkan renderer. Input is sometimes a trickier one to deal with but a lot of the time games are using cross-platform libraries for that already!
Despite all this the Unity engine has spotty Linux support. Some games run better under Wine vs. Unity's native Linux builds. It's Vulkan renderer has had a memory leak for a while now. Input has randomly decided to double keypresses on some distros.
The hard part of Linux ports isn't the first 90% (Using the Linux APIs). It's the second 90%.
Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.
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The killer for games tends to be the anti-cheat or anti-piracy layers.
I have a Windows game I can't run under CrossOver (aka Wine 11) or a VM, only because its anti-piracy layer doesn't accept those circumstances.
Meanwhile I had to pirate Dark Souls 1 because Microsoft's own DRM prevented the legitimately purchased game from saving on Windows, and download official no-cd patches for two other games because their DRM stopped working.
The problem with DRM is the DRM.