Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Microsoft 365 is probably a good idea, but Microsoft is missing one consumer product: a great cellphone running Windows and seamlessly working with other Windows devices. Having phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops all seamlessly working together is something that I now insist on. For now, this makes me an Apple customer because iPhone/iPad/MacBook devices work really well together. If Microsoft had a fantastic phone with handoff, they could compete better. (BTW, I briefly owned a Windows 10 laptop a few years ago - bought it just to play with Windows 10. I thought Windows 10 was quite good.)
Heck, you could even just use the phone's display as a keyboard / touchpad for the windows OS while displaying a desktop on the monitor.
BTW: I keep seeing people talk about this hybrid concept but I have yet to see a UI toolkit that trivially scales up and down between phone/desktop. It mostly seems to involve a lot of compromises and a lot of extra work.
The problem is that there is no phone with an i7, 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD now. That's my laptop. My phone is a sub 5" Xperia X Compact. 3GB, 32 GB storage, a Snapdragon 600 something. Fast but not suited for the job I'm doing on the laptop.
Then the battery. It would drain as fast as the one of those old laptops that need to have theirs replaced.
We're still not there and I not sure there is a market for that. Maybe we'll get there by inertia once batteries and cycles per Watt will allow it. The direction we are headed now for this use case is the phone CPU driving a smart terminal to a powerful remote computer, with attached monitor and input peripheral.
An alternative to docking station: these AR screens and keyboards from the Dennou Coil scifi anime https://mengle.wordpress.com/tag/dennou-coil/ Kind of Google Glasses required.
Except I don't care about desktopified android/iOS/windows phone apps. All I want is to run my already existing open source desktop linux applications. Chroot on android doesn't have hardware acceleration and you have to use VNC for anything graphical.
Note that the Lumia 950 with the current production of Continuum is effectively a technology demo of that model since it doesn't have x86 emulation [2] and therefore can't run the full breadth of Windows applications. That said, Continuum already does use the Phone's display as a keyboard, mouse, or just a second display according to your preference.
They tried and failed, very little chance they will try another shot at this, their brand is not associated with quality phones and it will be extremely hard to get developers to work on apps because they will believe the platform will be abandoned.
Still couldn't be bothered.
It's no better than markdown with pandoc (worse in fact, at least with pandoc you can use "$" and have latex do it.)
> With Build 16251, we are introducing the first set of features that enable “linking” your phone to your PC. This build’s scenario is focused on cross-device web-browsing. Today, we’re asking for you Windows Insiders to help us test this experience out using your Android phones. Support for iPhone is coming very soon, stay tuned.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/26/annou...
Also still updating and advancing Win10 Mobile; though obviously not making any devices.
I think the cheapest version is $70 a year. I'm still using office 2007 which cost about the same but has lasted 10 years. I dont think this software rental trend is anything about great value.
For a document editor or spreadsheet, continuous or even regular updates aren't important as long as it has the base features you need.
When you have a CRM that integrates with other systems, an accounting package that has to stay up to date with policies and laws, or even an IDE that can support numerous languages, regular updates are more valuable and in some cases necessary.
I used Office 2000 until I decommissioned my last Windows machine (dual boot even then) in 2010/11.
As a solution, I just set up a copy of Server 2016 Essentials, set the telemetry mode to "security" (which is easier said than done -- you have to go through an active directory server!) and installed Office 2016 Home + Student on it.
The lowest price for that Office SKU is $75 on Amazon at the moment, but normal retail is about twice that. It looks like they support current office releases for about 4 years, so I figure $40/year if I stay on the upgrade train and pay full price.
Server 2016 security updates end in 2026, and it retails for $400, so another $40/yr.
This all goes in a VM running on a low wattage (already always on) box, so it will hopefully update + reboot itself when I'm not around. Time will tell.
Electricity for my physical desktops running windows was $10's per month (windows refused to stay suspended...), and my incremental hardware costs are $0, so this is a lot less expensive than it looks.
Plus, this gets rid of the vast majority of the Win 10 spyware in a supported way, and future proofs against most hardware compatibility problems.
MS fanboy remark seems weird. I'm guessing you'll just think I'm an MS fanboy. Which would be silly, I use Apple products far more among other companies. OneDrive might actually be the only Microsoft app I use consistently.
Normal OneDrive which is what comes with the $80/year/5 people Office 365 isn't perfect. A few issues/features that they should have finished by now, but I'd be really surprised if regular OneDrive was causing those amt of issues.
I have had over 500GB syncing on OneDrive before via an office 365 account. It was fine. It would crash or mess up a lot more in early 2016 and 2015. But has been pretty good in the past year.
OneDrive still has issues though.
It doesn't understand symlinks and it doesn't allow far too many special characters in file names.
5 TB of OneDrive storage too.
Look. No referral or anything - https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-1-year-subscription-...
Great deal.
equivalent office 2007 for 5 family members is like $750? That's 10 years of 365, with no feature update (if you like that sort of thing) and no onedrive.
Is there any app that you use that wouldn't be covered by Office 365 Home edition?
Good strategy in theory, but looking at the Windows Store today, it seems like developers are not that interested in UWP and frankly, who can blame them?
If you want to write a tablet app, you target the iPad because it's the best product in that category. If you want to write a phone app, you target Android and iOS because that's where the money is today.
Is there good money to be made writing UWP at the moment? In my opinion, UWP apps on desktop are inferior to "classic" Windows apps. Windows 10 Mobile is pretty much dead at this point, so what's the point of UWP, what's the true benefit?
Only time will tell how effective this strategy is. I for one would love for this to succeed if it means better security for users (especially on older, technologically challenged folks)
Also, Edge only have a handful of extensions. If they want to compete against Chrome, they have to do something about that, otherwise people will just use Chromebooks.
The problem is that right now, doing UWP means no Win7 support, and that's a far larger segment - there are twice as many Win7 installs as there are all Win10 installs, and Win10 tablets would be positively minuscule in comparison. So this will change if and when Win10 becomes the dominant Windows desktop OS.
But we all know how users and many devs, actually value security.
Currently the only device shipping with 10S is the Surface Laptop, and it can be upgraded to regular Windows 10 Pro for free for the rest of the year. I suspect that step 1 of the Surface Laptop setup experience for users-in-the-know will be to do this upgrade, just like "uninstall craplets" has been for previous Windows laptops.
As consequence of the traditional WinDev vs DevTools relationship, WinRT did not care for a good story.
Worse, it forced devs to write the app three times because the APIs were not the same between phone, tablet and desktop.
Window 8.1, helped a bit with the Universal Apps model. Then the business code could be shared between platforms, but the views (XAML) still needed to be written three times.
Finally UWP was supposed to be back into one single code base for all platforms, but it still lacks polish.
One area is that .NET Native imposes restrictions on .NET code and they are still improving on that area.
Another burning point was that they dropped raw 2D APIs from .NET, forcing anyone that wanted accelerated graphics to go write DirectX code with C++/CX or C++/WRL. Forcing them to make Win2D available.
This is also one of the reasons why Visual Layer was later introduced.
C++ devs also don't know much what to expect.
Initially there was C++/CX and C++/WRL, then Kenny Kerr got hired to work on C++/WinRT, which would support UWP but with standard C++ instead of the extensions used by the former.
C++/WinRT is still WIP after two years, and C++ almost vanished from Microsoft UWP related presentations. The majority of C++ talks are always related to standards support, or OS X/Linux/Android related tooling support.
No word when C++/WinRT will reach feature parity with C++/CX, be supported on Blend or even actually integrated into Visual Studio.
Meanwhile HoloLens and Visual Layer graphical coding presentations are done with C#.
A real pity, because UWP is what I wish .NET would have been since version 1.0 built on COM and AOT compiled to native code, but Microsoft doesn't seem to get it right how to send an uniform message to the developers to build up confidence.
All these changes had their reasoned explanations back in the day: the install base was small so it didn't have much impact and they were removing cruft each time, but with hindsight it was a really bad way to go about creating a healthy ecosystem.
Windows 7 was .NET based, Silverlight for apps and XNA for games, native code was only available to Microsoft partners.
Then the WinDev won the next round and we got WinRT, fully based on COM, based on the initial design of .NET before CLR was a thing (Ext-VOS).
As side effect XNA and Silverlight were killed, not even ported to WinRT, and as I mentioned for accelerated graphics the APIs were only exposed at C++ level.
I have no interest in dockable phones or app handoff or any of that; never saw the point of it when using iOS + OS X, don't miss it now that I'm on Windows/Linux/Android.
(Currently dealing with Onedrive sync having self-destructed on her laptop, she is now much less of a Microsoft fan)
> Having phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops all seamlessly working together is something that I now insist on.
Yes, this is the problem Microsoft needs to focus on. 'A great cell phone running Windows' solves a problem for Microsoft. It's a self-centric view. Microsoft could make everything run seamlessly if they focused on that, instead of Windows on everything and walled gardens.
Open Source typically requires people to manage everything themselves, including update.
For those who see IT as cost-center/necessary evil, they want to have as less investment and as short-term as possible.
If this is the product of UX designers then I'm glad the OSS world doesn't have any.
I'd say there has been a renaissance of of VPS hosting, with DigitalOcean/Vultr and other providers offering a modernized UI, fast service, decent APIs, a few extra services, etc.
There is value in the simplicity of just getting root on a Linux box and setting up from there yourself.
New employer has dedicated machines on site which definitely helps.
Once I give the main system a kick it will scream on a few year old Xeon.
I've seen far too many 'shove everything on AWS' approaches fail to undertake it lightly.
I mean, I bet every government worker around the world needs a computer with an OS and an office suite. G7 countries could pool their resources together to hire engineers and designers and develop common solutions, like a FOSS alternative to Exchange, Windows and Office.
ReacOS would be a good start; it's already an open source clone of Windows.
Suggesting that we bury even more public funds into alternatives to Windows/Office is not helpful unless we can first devise a model that produces something better.
How is that efficient? What a waste of public funds.
What I am talking about is making ONE operating system for every level of governance. I'm talking about agreements by all party involved to pool their resources to make ONE OS, not 56.
The most popular desktop OS in the world is Windows. People are familiar with it and Win32 apps, so why not use ReactOS as a starting point?
That's exactly my point. Getting states to invest in free operating systems is not hard. But your proposal is only useful if it includes some way to get them to work together.
How are they supposed to fix the model they created?!
Would be interested in seeing companies that similar to IBM as Ben mentions, kept similar assets, but built new business models around them to accommodate a changing marketplace.
"Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is a comprehensive, general-purpose programming system which is being developed as a research project. The initial Multics system will be implemented on the GE 645 computer. One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility. Such systems must run continuously and reliably 7 days a week, 24 hours a day in a way similar to telephone or power systems, and must be capable of meeting wide service demands: from multiple man-machine interaction to the sequential processing of absentee-user jobs; from the use of the system with dedicated languages and subsystems to the programming of the system itself; and from centralized bulk card, tape, and printer facilities to remotely located terminals. Such information processing and communication systems are believed to be essential for the future growth of computer use in business, in industry, in government and in scientific laboratories as well as stimulating applications which would be otherwise undone."
Industry and academia were pretty terrible about giving the navigational people credit, or even citing/preserving their work (try getting a copy of a paper from the CODASYL proceedings to see what I mean).
Gray strongly disapproved of all that, so I doubt he would want credit for the previous generation's contributions.
Anyway, the old hierarchical/navigational/codasyl stuff was mostly forgotten, then reinvented (poorly, at first) as key value stores turned into document databases, etc.
Something similar happened with containers, etc. I think the end product of the current generation will surpass the old stuff in most ways, but it is painful to know the history and watch train wrecks of obvious implementation mistakes.