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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

The value MS gains from milking to non technical people for all they’re worth outweighs the loss of the occasional tech savvy user.

And sadly I think MS are still far from the tipping point and it will get worse and worse for some time to come.

The only thing the non-techies have is the law to protect them.

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I've directly moved at least 3 people out of Windows, and indirectly I'd guess at least a dozen. If all of us techies did the same, it'd be over pretty soon.

I've no one left to convert, my mums been running Linux since ~2016 when I got tired of her breaking windows (and in fairness it was her doing it most of the time) so I switched her to mint.

Her only requirement for her new computer is "it has to run that minty thing?" (it's actually running Fedora and has been for quite a while but that's the nice thing - she doesn't need to know or care) - it's still the same for her either way.

Same. My inlaws be rockin' ebay refurb lenovos with fedora for 6 years now

My score so far: 5 people directly, some ~40 workstations at my employer.

I disagree. Tech people shape governmental IT policies. You already see some governments in the EU moving away from Microsoft.

Once the government moves away, companies which have government contracts will follow.

I think the dominoes are starting to fall.

This is irrelevant to consumer adoption. The Chinese government uses their own Linux-based OS, which should be a common-sense national security policy, and it would certainly be a good idea for the rest of the world's governments to catch up and not rely on a US for-profit corporation. But even in China, 99% of regular people are using Windows.

The dominoes really aren't going anywhere. The average consumer has an extremely high tolerance for security and privacy violations, which is why the state of the market is the way it is, completely dominated by companies that are the antithesis of security and privacy. If a service offers utility to them, nothing else matters. And Windows offers a tremendous amount of utility to the average consumer relative to Linux. The things the general public cares about are not the same things anyone who uses this website cares about.

> The average consumer has an extremely high tolerance for security and privacy violations

Absolutely, or Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp and similar "apps" wouldn't be nearly as successful.

While I think you're mostly right, I disagree with the "tremendous utility [...] relative to Linux". My relatives are certainly no users of this website, and yet they get all the utility they need out of Linux. They don't care about the OS, they mostly just want to use a browser and a few other tasks that work perfectly fine with their Debian installs.

I remember Google being more popular with tech savvy users than Yahoo or Alta-Vista. IMO this is the writing on the wall.

They're pissing off the non technical people now, though. We'll see how it all plays out in the next few years.

They might be risking their quasi-monopoly/duopoly position. Probably not but before it was a 0% chance and now its nonzero.

I'm curious what they think the future looks like, Linux is growing on the desktop/laptop (in part driven by Valve/Steam), Users care less and less about PC's outside of the office generally - the primary computing device of most people is a phone not a PC doubly so if you exclude work - gaming has been a huge part of why many people still have PC's in the home and see above.

Not sure what their actual moat is in preventing a slow bleed out from multiple factors over the long term.

I think they'll hold businesses that are already on Windows for everything - like it/love it/loathe it Active Directory/Exchange etc do work for businesses but there has always been a halo effect from the same OS been used in the office as at work, i.e. people knew how to use word when they got into work because they'd used word at school (Chromebooks are very strong there) or home etc.

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