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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss.

I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.

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> to see if they are in red alert to get users back

I don't think they much care, long gone are the days of consumer Windows being a cash-cow. And if you buy a machine with Windows on and put Linux over the top, they still have that little bit of money from you via the manufacturer. Adverts on the start menu and such, is not an action that would be taken by a company with any real pride in their OS.

I think they have moved on to other sources of revenue, so I don't think they care that much anymore.

Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure.

Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.

Yeah, it's all AI, Azure, and Office 365. Everything else is basically a forgotten product by microsoft. Even xbox is basically dead at this point.

VS (and vscode) also get some love, though mainly as drivers towards getting things published using Azure infrastructure, SQL Server too.

Honestly I get the Xbox apathy. There's not that much profit in being what, third or fourth place? After Steam, Playstation and Nintendo? Depends how you define it, I guess, but to me they're in fourth place. Microsoft needs to either cut their losses or invest a ton of money. It looks like they will pick some weird thing in the middle, keeping Xbox on life support. Probably some unhappy compromise internally.

If it were forgotten it’s worked as it did. The problem it’s that it’s nerfed to funnel you through the new AI or Cloud user harvesting.

Funny, not to oversimplify, but this is basically how IBM exited the consumer market

Yup. They’re not stupid, they’re sunsetting that pandering to consumers OS market.

Consumer Windows for those that care is an almost worthless business. Nobody will pay what was once paid for a windows license anymore. They will squeeze existing users who know no different in ways 2006 adware purveyors could dream of and monetize it that way. For the rest of non enterprise users, they don't care.

They would only start to care when they see their enterprise business migrating to Linux. As long as they have large businesses buying a suite of licenses for Auth, OS & Office, they have an amazing monopoly cash cow distribution platform. They can enter new markets, offer an inferior product for free as part of their suite & crush the competition.

Europe has shown themselves to be completely unwilling or unable to regulate the giant. So they stopped caring. They crank out cheap crap and charge top dollar because no one can stop them.

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