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The End of Windows

stratechery.com

251–260 of 617 posts

Re: The End of Windows

#251
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter. No, established enterprises (both private and government) are, in the real world, important customers for cloud offerings like Azure, GCP, and AWS.

During a AWS demonstration at work. The Amazon guy specifically mentioned, AWS is a more lucrative option for large companies than small ones, simply because it was an easy one time way of culling large teams in big companies who were adding very little to nothing in return in value.

Hmm, not convinced about that.

My Boss is smart and he'd wonder what the business plan would be should say 5 years down the line you want to move away from the cloud for some reason.

You threw away decades of accumulated knowledge about the company and it's systems to save some money upfront.

He thinks on a longer scope than most bosses I've known though (largely because his family own the group so he doesn't have to answer to shareholders).

Re: The End of Windows

#252

Dear Microsoft, If you’re not using the PC, can we have it back? — General Purpose Computing

General Purpose Computing using PC's is a thing because of Microsoft (and IBM). Without those two there would have never been a PC in the first place. The forces against general purpose computing are to be found on 1 infinite loop and 1600 Amphitheatre parkway.

Uh, I think you need to review history of computing. The market was full of competing platforms in the early 80's. The PC became the dominant platform due to complex network effects, the least not being the IBM brand. DOS was bought from a third party guy in a garage and slapped on top of the x86 platform.

Re: The End of Windows

#253
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently Android seems to have lost the tablet war on consumer electronic shops. People are either going for iPads, or hybrid laptops runnig W10. Android devs are to blame, given the little effort to adapt phone apps to tablets.

citation needed http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

actually, if you drill down to tablets, which the GP was referring to, the iOS has 2/3 market share.

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/tablet/worldwide

Re: The End of Windows

#254
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During a AWS demonstration at work. The Amazon guy specifically mentioned, AWS is a more lucrative option for large companies than small ones, simply because it was an easy one time way of culling large teams in big companies who were adding very little to nothing in return in value.

Yeah, that ought to be a great sales line. I'd be wary about how the real world actually deals with that, but there is no lack of large companies jumping on short term costs cuts without looking at the risks.

From the point of view of upper management in a large enterprise, paying a third party with whom they have an SLA and someone to sue for infrastructure which may go down vs. paying their own staff to build and maintain the infrastructure that may go down often either isn't a difference in risk or, actually, the former seems to be better-managed risk. It's the same reason they often prefer to buy support contracts even for OSS rather than supporting it internally. Part of the analysis that probably gets overlooked from the outside is that employees aren't just a predictable cost they also are a risk.

Re: The End of Windows

#255
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

citation needed http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

So what, if I find a source that contradicts your's would you just put yet another link? I know what I see when I go into a store, travel across Europe and look around for what the other passengers are using. If you feel vindicated by posting some random link asserting you are right, so be it.

i'm not posting a "random link" to prove you wrong. I googled around and saw a few sources all of which seem to agree on current market share, which made me genuinely confused by your comment.

Re: The End of Windows

#256

I still can't wrap my head around everything that was wrongheaded about Windows 8, and I was working there for most of its dev cycle. One wonders what would have happened if they just sort of let Windows be Windows. I.e. if they had continued iterating on core stuff but left UI and general philosophy resembling Win7's trajectory and not tried to force people into WinRT/UWP/store. Even though Win10 attempted correctiv…

It felt like somebody on very high level decided to have unified experience for both tablets and desktops. Then those people who told this is impossible to do (well) in given timeframe were ignored. Windows 8 was what they managed to scrape together before running out of time. Delay was not an option as the tablet hardware launch was depending on the OS.

Re: The End of Windows

#257
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

You seem to assume a large portion of users are software engineers or tech people. You may consider a 16GB ‘bare minimum’, but not everyone needs that - nor can even afford that (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750).

Re: The End of Windows

#258
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768

It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users.

Re: The End of Windows

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...because Microsoft is good at marketing, has no ethics, and successfully leveraged its advantages in the 90s to kill all the competition? Is this a trick question?

Possibly, or maybe that's an excuse the community uses because they're unwilling to see how openly hostile they are to proprietary software on their platform. Let me ask you a quick question: How can I distribute an application in a way that will work on all Linux Desktops?

>>> Let me ask you a quick question: How can I distribute an application in a way that will work on all Linux Desktops?

It's a trick question without a clear answer.

Many people tried, noone has ever succeeded.

Re: The End of Windows

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And with every shift towards ads You mean like Apple asking me to use iCloud every single time I unlock my Mac? Or every time I power on my test iOS devices? Or do you mean up I have to open the App Store to apply MacOS updates and click past the ads? Windows 10 adds some shortcuts to the start menu during the bi-annual updates, they're annoying but once they're deleted they don't come back. They also have an add i…

> You mean like Apple asking me to use iCloud every single time I unlock my Mac? Or every time I power on my test iOS devices? wtf? I don't use iCloud and don't get this nag. I only get a single question when I reimage my test computers or wipe a test device, that's it. > Windows 8.1 and 10 don't require UWP apps to be full screen. The start menu is enough for me to permanently turn me away. Or this stupid "tile" int…

> I don't use iCloud and don't get this nag.

Are you signed into it though? I'm not and it nags me to sign in.

> The start menu is enough for me to permanently turn me away.

Which one? 8, 8.1 and 10 all have very different start menus.

> Or this stupid "tile" interface. What's that crap even for?

In Windows 10 it's not unlike Dashboard in MacOS.

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