I bet they did exactly that and the answer was: we're going to milk our users as long as Windows is still relevant.
Windows doesn't seem to have much of a priority anymore at MS now that Azure is the new darling.
Also Azure sucks compared to most other cloud providers so that’s not a basket I would put all my eggs in.
I think I have seen other ad-adjacent messaging for other paid Apple services but I can't think of any off the top of my head right now.
Compared to Microsoft? It's several orders of magnitude smaller.
- banner ads inside of the Apple News app. Similar to what other news sites include but fewer ads.
- App Store home page - at least some of the apps featured there are paid placements.
- pay for placement listings on the App Store. When you do a search, the first result or two is a paid listing.
- App Store app page with "you might also like" lists at the bottom of the page.
And as Office moves to the cloud all they need is just a thin-client running Edge.
WSL2 already uses a VNC/RDP something to show Linux applications on the host, so it's not far-fetched to run the old legacy stuff in Windows VMs on Azure and VNC/RDP that to the user.
but I think corporate IT is still in love with group policies, and many fancy "endpoint security" things (device management for compliance), and they might be slow to change
Aye, AD rules the roost, as does O365 and being able to lock down work laptops.
I've done work w/ FreeIPA and OpenLDAP stuff -- and as much as I hate to admit it, I think AD is better for that, and it's not hard to find an SME. Also kinda liked powershell, though I don't use it very often.
Not sure I agree with the logic, but this is what I imagine the reasoning is.
I don't think the reasoning applies when you still have market dominance, and MS still does on the desktop.
At that point, Windows would just become another Linux distro. We could finally talk about it being the year of the Linux desktop without it being a meme.
On one hand, it could mean MS could lay off a TON of staff since they don't have to maintain their own kernel and can rely on open source. On the other, it would likely mean that software designed for Windows could now easily be run on any other Linux distro with little work. For many people (especially gamers), there'd be no reason to use Windows anymore.
It's a pipe dream, for sure. If it happened, wouldn't it require MS to open source Windows, especially if they made their own modifications to the Linux kernel?
For a start, it doesn't appear from Windows 11 that "looking, feeling or acting like the Windows UI that users want" is actually something very high up the priority list for Microsoft.