I kind of expect that the "let consumers be the beta testers and fire all our QA" approach is going to majorly bite them in the ass at some point and lose a lot of goodwill.
However, it looks like Microsoft is isolating the online services from the client platform in order to de-prioritise Windows, which inherently makes Windows itself more replaceable. That creates a huge potential gap in the overall tech market, particularly once Windows 7 reaches end-of-support and a lot of people are going to be wondering about what they can do if they don't want Windows 10. (After all, if they did want Windows 10, why are so many people still not using it?)
There obviously aren't that many businesses that would be in a position to exploit such a vulnerability and start building not just a viable alternative client OS but a viable alternative ecosystem around it, but there are some. Apple could be a threat from one direction. Traditional big tech companies like IBM could be a threat from another. With the foundations available with modern OSS stacks, an unexpected alternative from (or sponsored by) the likes of Red Hat might be less likely but not totally out of the question either, or even a curveball from the likes of Intel.
So, what if one or more of them really did produce a compelling client platform and moved the whole industry back in the direction of local software and in-house operations? If the current focus on Cloud everything wanes, but Microsoft has voluntarily given up its long-standing dominance of the more traditional parts of the industry by neglecting Windows as a platform in its own right, where does that leave their online services five or ten years from now?
Maybe the likes of Satya Nadella are just much better connected in the big boardrooms than a mere geek like me, and they're confident that the emphasis on Cloud everything isn't going anywhere any time soon. But now we've been doing that for a while and the gloss has worn off a bit with all the real world problems of reliability, security, leaks, costs, and so on, I can't help wondering whether Nadella is mostly playing to Cloud-obsessed big investors and at some point those investors will prove to have been throwing good money after bad because they didn't know any better.
I've been thinking about this too but I don't see who would stand to gain from it.
If Wine got some serious commercial backing it could be leveraged to run all "legacy" Windows apps on another platform (Linux). Desktop Linux is relatively far along but with solid commercial backing it could become a serious contender. Or something more exotic...
The only question is: cui bono? Who would have a reason to go that route?
The claimed benefits of the Cloud have always been as much hype as substance, and a lot of the "sales pitch" in the early days has now been debunked. We're not going to run short of stories about major Cloud services having significant downtime, poor support, data leaks and so on any time soon.
Likewise SaaS is a great pitch if you're a software developer, and converting capex to opex makes it attractive in some contexts as a customer as well. However, I get the feeling that patience is starting to wear a bit thin in some quarters now, with customers looking at the overall costs they're paying, how many improvements they're really seeing in return, and also how many unwanted changes are being pushed out.
Depending on where you stand on those issues, combined with the general dumbing down associated with many online apps compared to traditional desktop software, I can imagine a variety of situations where businesses might be looking at keeping more IT in-house as we go round the cycle again. For personal use, I suspect there's less of an incentive because many of these users are quite happy with just using their tech for basic communications and information retrieval, but for those who do want to do more creative things or who enjoy more demanding applications like games, again there's surely a big enough market for a serious desktop OS with an emphasis on good management of local native applications and not just being an expensive thin client for online services.
So who potentially benefits from an industry shift? I guess the simple answer is anyone who is interested in developing software for the markets I just described.
Someone like Valve, who has a massive investment in Windows software in areas that Microsoft has specifically targeted for "embracing."
What Microsoft doesn't seem to understand is that when they screw with Windows and deprioritize the needs of its users, they're also screwing with the rest of us who live, work, and play in their ecosystem. Gabe Newell, being an old-school 'softie himself, understands that very well... and he's one of the few interested parties with the funding to do something about it.
That is the part that baffles me. Visual Studio Code is a fantastic advert for the Microsoft brand: every day it shows every developer who uses it that MS can produce genuinely great software. It makes Azure more credible, as well as providing on-ramps to services. If people have a bad experience with Windows, why would they be inclined to get other services from MS?
Ironically, we decided not to try out VS Code specifically because of privacy/security concerns about Microsoft that have been heightened since Windows 10. We checked Microsoft's written policies to see what sort of telemetry data was being uploaded. We were unable to find any detailed information about it, and the general wording appeared to allow for uploading more-or-less anything, up to and including our own code.
"telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false, "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false,
into vscode settings and you are fine wrt telemetry.
What concerns me more is that the .rpm build is consistently later than other builds. Usually it means, that the user is staring 2 out of 4 weeks every month on update notification, that cannot be used, because the build is not ready yet.
It brings back the memories of MSIE and WMP that used to be available for Solaris and HP-UX, always slightly later... until they weren't and the users were left in the dark.
... for the moment, as far as you know.
The problem is the trust thing, not the telemetry thing.
Yes, exactly, and trust is hard to earn but easily lost. Given the corporate philosophy of Nadella's Microsoft, and the fact that Nadella was made CEO in the first place when it was pretty clear what style of leader he was going to be, I don't see Microsoft ever regaining the kind of trust we used to place in it without fundamental changes that start at the highest levels. And sadly, as long as investors continue to buy into that vision, those changes are highly unlikely.
It's not often I feel so strongly about a business, but Microsoft's actions in recent years almost feel like a personal betrayal after being being their customer for so long and trusting them as a keystone of the tech industry. In this case, I really do regard them as "the enemy" now, and I really do hope that someone else will drive a wedge through a gap created by their customer-hostile strategy with painful and expensive consequences for their management and investors.
I wish I could agree with you. However, the QA layoffs at Microsoft were in 2014; if something like was going to happen, it would have happened by now.
I have championed it when it came out, and despite being in a hard position to pick one up I managed to do so.
I deeply deeply regret it.
If anything I have gone from being a massive supporter to actively doing what I can to spite the brand.
The product is an expensive laptop, which has such critical issues with it that it renders it inoperable.
Then when you need to try and talk to MSFT help, they are about as capable as toddlers. Politely unaware and unhelpful.
The surface line went from having a great rating, to having that rating revoked since it is unrepairable.
I want to love my device, I am using it right now, but there are serious issues with it, and this is a device which has been placed in the same context as apple products and their legendary support reputation./