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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

> Thankfully that future didn't happen and Windows is essentially only relevant for running PC games today.

What an odd statement. You’re ignoring the vast majority of all office computers all over the world here, the on-prem infrastructure of most companies, and cheap home computers. Not everyone can afford to buy a Mac; Office tools and huge swaths of domain-specific tools only run on Windows; and despite what Linux enthusiasts want you to believe, Linux doesn’t support existing Windows software well enough for common business use.

You may be referring to the needs of rich software engineers in western countries exclusively here, but overwhelming majority of the world’s client computers are firmly in Microsoft’s hands.

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A massive amount of computing - especially outside of western & corporate offices - has moved to mobile. It's pretty wild as a developer who learned the trade when everything ran windows to now to target users who do their jobs with only a phone and don't even own what we historically call a "computer". Eventually those windows binaries and IIS apps will die as well, and MS has given up on Windows serving all those requests. They've done an amazing job of moving their business away from the OS in my view.

Oh I'm sure a lot has, but there is still a ton of Windows-only software out there. All those commercial tools engineers use to study the power grid are almost always Windows-only (at least the 10 major vendors I can think of off hand). I'm sure many other industries are similar. Also, all user laptops at a lot of corporations are Windows-only. It's changing of course, but not quickly.

And those mobile devices are managed with Intune/Azure.

Most relevant software today runs in web browsers or are cross-platform applications, so even when you have a Windows laptop, you probably spend most time in a web browser or a webview wrapped in an app and not in a native and exclusive Windows application.

That's a very different situation from 20 years ago, where a lot of important software only existed for Windows.

E.g. today you can just ditch Windows and install Linux on that same old laptop and wouldn't lose anything important.

Found the programmer...

You have an extremely skewed view of what "relevant software" is, if you believe this. The second you try and use a computer for anything professional, besides nerd stuff and a few key "creative" areas that Apple has cultural cachet in like music production and graphic design, you are absolutely going to find yourself reliant on some completely entrenched "industry standard" piece of software that's been around for many decades and only runs on Microsoft Windows. Autodesk still sells 3ds Max for a couple grand, and it's Windows-only. Hell, even TurboTax only runs on Windows. And if you manage to dodge that, there's bound to be some critical piece of hardware that can only be controlled from a Windows computer.

The biggest propaganda win that Microsoft pulled was getting nerds - the biggest loudmouths about software freedom - off their case. 90s style free software fanaticism is basically dead. Meanwhile the rest of the world is absolutely still locked in to Windows. Know how you can tell? Because Windows is now widely regarded as a pile of shit, riddled with adware even out of the box ("Candy Crush in the Start menu") and yet people still use it, because they have to.

>E.g. today you can just ditch Windows and install Linux on that same old laptop and wouldn't lose anything important.

I challenge you to try this with a nontechnical friend who uses a computer for work. They will be screaming at you to put it back like it was within the week. I say this as a die-hard Linux user.

> The biggest propaganda win that Microsoft pulled was getting nerds - the biggest loudmouths about software freedom - off their case

it still amazes me how the newer generation of technical people see Microsoft as non-evil or, in some cases, even the good guy. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was re-convincing the world he doesn't exist.

edit: wasn't the google motto "don't be evil" basically meant to mean don't be Microsoft?

Try easily finding admins and heldesk staff to manage your 1000+ org using something other than Active Directory and M365. MS absolutely owns this space.

> "The biggest propaganda win that Microsoft pulled was getting nerds - the biggest loudmouths about software freedom - off their case."

Microsoft didn't lift a finger. In the early years while they still had developer fanaticism behind it, the FOSS movement delivered Linux, which was an adequate substitute for Windows, but failed to deliver an adequate software ecosystem to compete with the Windows software ecosystem to jumpstart Linux desktop adoption. Excel and Active Directory are big examples but I'm sure people can come up with others. So users stayed where the software they needed was.

FOSS momentum really began to falter once it became clear that none of the proposed business models that were based on being free and open, OSI style, were working and the money hungry beancounters started moving to faux open source licenses like shared source. But Microsoft had nothing to do with that either other than simply surviving long enough for it to happen.

> "Because Windows is now widely regarded as a pile of shit..."

People eat at McDonalds and drink coffee at Starbucks by the millions every day. It all might be shit but being consistent has a value of its own.

Thing is, most people don't use a computer for "anything professional" these days beyond Outlook and maybe Office at work, plus LOBs which are almost always web apps these days.

In fact, it increasingly feels like desktop itself is relegated to this kind of use, with smartphone becoming the primary computing device for most things.

> plus LOBs which are almost always web apps these days.

And this is where Linux won over MS - it wasn't on the desktop (which is still a mostly terrible experience to this day), but in the server room.

Coupled with Java or Perl and OSS Databases (MySQL and Postgres), people began moving software off the desktop and onto websites. Better web browsers (something else MS tried to dominate and were rebuffed) also helped. This cut MS out of the loop on new popular web servers (apache), protocols, languages and infrastructure - probably deliberately. This then allowed alternative platforms like the new iPhone and later android to gain a niche which they've since expanded massively.

I think people saw the monoculture that was developing around Windows (from days of XP onwards), and didn't like it, so actively sought to make their own path, Linux became was keystone there (could have been BSD though also...).

Perhaps more importantly, given enough years and as the technology commoditizes, the "need" to take sides about whatever tech lessens. "Sides" are usually for the hot big thing in tech. But OSes are long past that phase and far too unexciting for most people to have the critical mass needed to create this kind of polarization.

As long as the browser variants of Microsoft Office aren’t as capable as their desktop variants, that isn’t relevant. CAD software is another contender that mostly requires a Windows environment; as is lots of financial software and industrial control tools.

I agree with you that many people probably could use a Linux computer if there was any incentive to go that direction. That isn’t reality though, and likely won’t be any time soon.

Also, for most people these days, Android and iOS are the primary operating systems in use. And you can’t easily run Windows applications there.

You’re thinking of end users. The masses of office workers in the world are, and will continue to be, using Microsoft Office as their most important tool of trade, and thus will continue to run Windows.

Office computers are a niche. A big niche, but still a niche: probably 500 million world-wide. Meanwhile there are 4.88 billion smartphone users.

HN has a blind spot for companies bigger than their startups. They don't realize how much large corps rely on AD/AAD/M365. For the vast majority of companies anything other than Windows/MS is a non-starter. This shit comes up in every single MS related submission.

This. _Didn't see it therefore it doesn't exist_.

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