Hacker News Reader

Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately Operating Systems is only 10% of MSFTs revenue. I'm sure MSFT cares about getting money out of Windows, but it's not really do-or-die. I think that's kind of why it feels like the OS is languishing - MSFT has found lots of other ways to monetize.

View on HN

Office sucks, Azure sucks, Windows sucks, xbox sucks and etc. Everything modern microsoft touches turns to crap. The only good thing they have is VScode and even that is getting bloated.

I'm in my 30' so I remember office 97 and 2000.

I still believe that was the peak of their UX.

>Office sucks, Azure sucks, Windows sucks, xbox sucks and etc. Everything modern microsoft touches turns to crap.

That might be true, but judging from desktop OS market share, what the competition is doing, sucks more.

linux is more usable today than ever before. The only chokehold that microsoft have on windows is legacy business apps, and office (and various compliance requirements for gov't software that opensource tend not to have, like FEDRAMP).

MacOS is gaining ground, but because their hardware is legitimately superior. I imagine commodity laptops to be a dying breed in a few more years.

Gaming on a windows PC is the last bastion that macs tend not to compete in at all, and on that front there's SteamOS.

Microsoft signed their own OS death warrant when they switched from being backward-compatibility oriented way back in the Vista days. It might take another 2 decades for it all to play out, but from what i can see, it's one straight road down to obsoletion.

It's all forward looking with MacOS and Linux. Windows is the only OS that can do everything anyone asks of it right now, which is in my book what a computer should do. If games work via Proton/Wine they will have worse performance. Many do not work at all due to requiring anticheat. Windows, as a certain group loves to say, just works.

The sales pitch Microsoft has with Office (including Teams and SharePoint), EntraID (formerly Azure AD) and Azure is pretty strong for companies.

Real competition only works in the fairy tale of the free market, where users have all the time and money they want to make a selection and do the transition. It's not the reality. People use MS products because they have to, not because they choose to. Even MS knows and uses this, let's start from that

Windows is the base that they use to get buy in on all their other products though. If everyone was on linux why not switch to google workspace at a third the cost?

You're not wrong. It would be more challenging, but I think the bundle of services Microsoft offers to companies is easy to get entrenched into? If you get some Azure credits for using their stuff then maybe you don't want to deal with egress fees. Maybe you get LinkedIn Premium for free for all your in-house recruiters. Microsoft Teams isn't great, but at least it comes free instead of paying a ton to run your organization on Slack, etc.

Google Workspace is not comparable. Every large enterprise seems to run on Mac and MS 365.

I mean theyre definitely comparable. I agree office sees wider use but worse decisions have been made to save however many millions large corporations are spending here.

I think you need to get out of tech if you think every large enterprise runs on mac

No, the enterprise features of Azure AD, InTune etc really are not comparable. A large enterprise can't run on Google. Sure - smaller firms can and maybe should, it's much simpler.

2 of the 5 companies Ive worked for have been on google workspaces. Both fortune 500 companies

Interesting... I worked for a much smaller company that used it and it was a terrible experience. I was really glad to go back to Teams...

I've never worked at an enterprise primarily (or even significantly) using mac computers. Are you in creative arts? Many digital art software only run on Mac.

Software engineering. Never had to be forced to a Windows computer, fortunately. Past 5 years mostly everyone seems to have switched.

Trying to write software on a mac sounds like hell. The utter lack of proper IDE tools and feature parity.

I am using the same IDE I always used on Linux. Anything that works there works on Mac too. The only thing not available is Visual Studio (the older, bigger one) - thankfully I don't need that one, but I wouldn't want to use it on Windows either.

A third of the cost? Their lowest tiers start at the same price, and pricing is similar at least up until the enterprise tiers, at which point pricing isn't transparent for either company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com