Hacker News Reader

Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Until you actually need to run a business. Then money is much more important than the preferences of your employees. That's why Apple has barely penetrated the business world beyond overfunded startups that are more driven by hype and design wanna-bes than actual profit.

View on HN

Microsoft fumbled the Windows ball so hard, everybody i know got rid of their Windows PC and either went to Android/iPhone or got a Mac or Linux.

At work we can freely choose which OS we run on our machines. Guess what everybody wants since IT got forced to upgrade each laptop to Windows 11? Macbook Pro.

I personally am running Linux just because I already know how to use it but macOS (despite its flaws) is way less intrusive and much faster than Windows. Even Microsoft's own programs (Office 365, Teams) are running faster and have better UX on macOS than on Windows.

10% of Microsoft's revenue is Windows. Azure is closer to 40%. Their focus has shifted hard from software to services. Azure is making them around $100B and growing. It'd be far more surprising if they were putting their focus back to Windows in a saturated market given all the incentives they have to chase bigger revenue elsewhere.

Yeah, but there's no reason to go Azure unless you are really tied to the MS Windows ecosystem.

If there's choice, everyone goes with Linux servers.

We chose Azure for our startup because of data location, and it was cheaper than the other two as well. Data center locations may not matter much in the US (because everyone has this covered well), but it does in other places of the world.

Point taken.

But, are your servers Linux or Windows?

Can't reply to @shorel, but of course Azure is running Linux servers. It has nothing to do with being tied to a Windows ecosystem.

Your choice to go with Azure probably has more to do with where you're getting value for cloud services, and where you started your project - in other words, how tied you are to the Azure ecosystem, or the AWS ecosystem as the case may be.

Many larger businesses have a contract with Microsoft for their Windows licenses and then go to Azure because they already get billed by them.

And Linux is the premier OS on Azure. I'll never stop getting a kick out of Azure Linux.

https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux

Most devs choosing Macbooks has a lot to do with culture. It's boutique, cool, and all the other successful people have it. Yes, officially it's always for technical reasons, but no one would ever admit to get something just because it's shiny.

Hmm, you are saying that devs have preferred a POSIX system over whatever Windows 11 is, because it's "boutique"?

Not OP, but I absolutely know people like this. Devs who don't even know what POSIX is, let alone care whether their OS is compliant.

Yes, exactly.

And yes, I'm well aware this embarrasses some folks, hence the negative reaction.

Sorry, I didn't realize I was replying to ... a person like this. I hope things get better for you soon.

That's exactly what I mean.

I chose a MacBook as my laptop last job because my Nvidia drivers kept breaking on my Linux laptop

A large majority of windows devs choose Apple hardware has to major challenges for MS.

If devs just want shiny flashy then MS has failed at providing that directly or through their partners. If devs are able to make credible technical reasons, year after year, that sustain IT & budgetary scrutiny, that also is a failure from MS.

Personally “being able to run docker without this bs” was credible for many years, tech that now is a de facto expectation for most .NET dev jobs and well-integrated-ish into windows and WSL.

One can argue they made much more money selling to people than business. Business forces you to compete on price and that drives everything down to 0. The market clearly values selling to people more than selling to business: look at their stock price. So if you are actually running a computer company wouldn't it be better if you took Apple's approach (if you could)?

I feel like businesses could spend way less (money-wise and time-wise) on technical support if they just gave out MacBook Airs to their employees which could then remote into virtual Windows desktops for whatever legacy software they need to use.

Why should 90% of people need to deal with BIOS updates, driver updates, daily operating system updates, and blue screens of death?

> Until you actually need to run a business. Did you mean to say "Until you actually need to sell to a business."? They did do very well for a long time mostly by focusing on consumers...

Macs have a smaller marketshare for Business than Windows machines, but iPhones are ubiquitous in enterprise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com