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Comment by hamandcheese | Hacker News Reader

I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.

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Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies.

I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.

My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel.

I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.

I jumped ship when WSL came to be. I was more a Cygwin user, all the features of linux but done differently. Been using FreeBSD for years now.

> "My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel."

There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel.

Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?

Linux has won on phones (Android) and on the server side. I don't think Windows Server is seriously used for anything but Exchange/AD these days, outside of hosting specialized or legacy apps.

Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.

So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.

Even if you consider running on tightly locked down devices to support a monopoly a win, the adoption of the Linux kernel for Android has the same basis as it does for server adoption: people love getting the hard work of others for free. It's basically buying market share. I mean, if Microsoft also started giving away Windows for free and took a bunch of market share away, would you consider that a legitimate win for them?

Windows is still very present in the Enterprise, for many more reasons than AD/Exchange.

The Linux kernel won on phones, there is hardly any GNU/Linux on a Java based userspace.

And everyone that tries to force GNU/Linux via NDK, discovers that not everything Linux is supported.

This 100%. These threads are the same shit I was reading on Slashdot in 1999

There was also the whole "web apps are coming and they run everywhere" thing. Which actually did work out exactly as people expected it to, although it took longer than most predicted - but your average casual PC user spends most of their time in the browser these days.

However, while those web apps might run on Linux (or not, if it uses DRM like all those streaming providers), they increasingly only run in Chrome.

I don't see that making much sense, honestly. Windows kernel is super solid and well architectured. There are thousands of drivers for every peripheral on the Earth. And I don't believe that Microsoft spends that much on kernel development to be incentivised to cut it.

If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.

I disagree. I think the end of the “world revolves around Windows” era of Microsoft has been hugely beneficial to the OS. Microsoft is way less hostile to other platforms now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.

WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.

I disagree that Microsoft benefits the end user. Their IoT which took over the Embedded version of Windows is completely bloated in 10 and higher. Version 7 allowed for only installing necessities where their successors force XBox and other built in forced features. Windows 11 IoT is also forcing the creation of a Microsoft account instead of allowing an local account. IoT / Embedded does not mean it is connect and often air gaped. They are also often used to host products and should not have a Microsoft account assigned.

Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.

Isn’t Windows IoT a pretty niche distribution? Surely it’s less than 1% of Windows users.

Niche distribution has nothing to do with quality of distribution. The user base are passive users versus active users like daily office and game users.

The quality has gone done hill. Windows Embedded / IoT is often used to run your ATMs or some form of industrial automation. Windows actually has a real-time OS (RTOS) mode for just this.

The company I work has planned to replace Windows with Linux for future products and even moving active products to support both Windows and Linux during the transition. Only products that will stay on Windows will be legacy that are near EOL.

Personally, I would never use Windows OS for future products and solutions in these environments. Nor would I use it for network / server based solutions.

> now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.

I think that's true for the consumer side, but I believe Micrsoft still sees value in truly owning a complete system software stack.

Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.

It does, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...

One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive?

I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.

At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.

The issues people cite all primarily affect consumer desktops. I don't think they see decades of lifetime there; it's a dying market, so they milk it.

I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware.

Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.

I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified version of Windows. They won't take my money.

None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.

I think a lot of power users would prefer to pay somewhere between $50-$100 for a Windows license if it meant the enshittifcation wasn't included

> I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0.

The price of the windows license has been included in the price of PCs for literally decades now. Every computer you buy with windows preinstalled nets Microsoft a couple dozen dollars.

Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.

I think their earnings are detailed here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3...

IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes:

> Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates

So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue.

But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.

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