Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

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His take is that for consumers Microsoft will abandon windows in favor of Linux. He predicts Linux will get better. And windows will get worse in development and support. And so Microsoft will give up on windows. And that worsening trend plus abandonment plus Linux improvements will cause Microsoft supporting Linux.

The probability of each event happening is high enough. But the probability of all three happening at once is low. And that is why this prediction is difficult to believe.

I think it is true windows dev is much more difficult now. The platform has an identity split. It used to favor power users. Now it favors the rich mac users. And upcoming kids who are attached to iPhones. And this means… it gets worse … Or it changes audience. The latter will be hard to pull off.

I think Microsoft also has less need for windows. We know this because its core business has been shifting. They are platform agnostic now.

So what becomes the incentive for Microsoft to continue windows?

Because they're a corporation that makes money. They have incentives to employ people, and the vendor lock-in with Windows is far too large to change anything at the moment or anytime in the foreseeable future. Changing Windows to become a Linux-based distro would be a massive corporate undertaking; Microsoft isn't in the business of pleasing tech-minded people. They're a business that makes money.

Linux isn't a corporation; it's really more of an idea. They don't have marketing departments or people trying to sell you licenses. They don't have vendor lock-in or active-directory or a cloud based infastructure. They don't have an entire advertising division or a search engine. There aren't any shareholders to please or paid employees to keep on payroll for government kickbacks. They're not targeting the casual, media-focused, average computer user like Microsoft, which makes a lot of money by doing so.

In my last job, I worked in a mid-sized suburban office. There weren't any "Linux reps" knocking on our door, making sure we were getting the most out of Ubuntu.

Hardly, SteamDeck will get those Windows games, that game developers write using Visual Studio on Windows, because they push Proton instead of making the studios interested into native ports.

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