Hacker News Reader

I would guess Fortune 500 still runs on desktop windows? (Don’t know but this is just my guess).

Yep. Most any regular company is majority windows. It’s not exciting but why would they bother throwing that influence away.

Yup! Boring technologies are great.

Yes, but for how long? At some point, IT realizes everything's in the browser, and general-purpose computing is a security risk.

Not every company is a startup that only needs gmail and Figma, though. The ecosystem of LoB apps and device controller software is ginormous, and not going away any time soon.

It will be a long time before Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Excel are not important enough to enterprises to justify the Microsoft subscription. And Visual Studio is still a huge part of the Microsoft capture strategy.

Microsoft is working on separating all of the above from Windows without losing too much control but it is going to take a while.

> Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Excel

Exchange should be SaaS for 99% of businesses. There's a web version of Excel that's probably OK-ish. I'm not sure what Active Directory looks like in a world without Windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com