Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
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Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
1–10 of 166 posts
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#2Or, perhaps they said “Chromium compiles easily for Linux and we can get a little goodwill from corporate IT that wants to provide managed browsing for their Linux folks”.
I don’t think the situation that the article provides is impossible, but at the same time I don’t think that Edge is a good indicator.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#3Many, many enterprises still pay Microsoft billions of dollars in licenses for Windows and Office to run Excel ‘apps’ powered by VB macros. Until that has need has diminished, I really doubt Microsoft will give up their NT kernel. At least not on corporate land, maybe for consumers.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#4I just wonder where the point of convergence will be - I imagine that even consolidation of linux and Windows will be a local minima, just like Linux as the primary Unix-ish OS (not counting apple stuff) is a local minima.
With the increasing dominance of cloud-based infrastructure, will laptops/smartphones/tablets in the 2050s all be Linux based zero-clients running on 8G networks?
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#5>Accordingly, the return on investment of spending on Windows development is falling. As PC volume sales continue to fall off , it’s inevitably going to stop being a profit center and turn into a drag on the business.
Would that mean Microsoft could become like Apple on iDevices and force all Windows apps to be sold via the Windows Store for a 30% cut, to increase security of Windows and cut down most malware? What would be an estimate of how much money MS would have made over the years with a 30% cut similar to Apple? A couple trillion?
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#6Many, many enterprises still pay Microsoft billions of dollars in licenses for Windows and Office to run Excel ‘apps’ powered by VB macros. Until that has need has diminished, I really doubt Microsoft will give up their NT kernel. At least not on corporate land, maybe for consumers.
Perhaps Microsoft will still sell Excel, but provide a proton layer
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#7I think the OP is right and few people seem to realize what MS is doing by "featurizing" Linux. If devs and enterpise want FOSS and Linux (which they do) and all the enterprise users are on Windows (which they are), it makes sense for those distinctions to go away. The easiest way for MS to accomplish that is to fold Linux into the Windows desktop. Everybody gets what they want since users don't care where software runs or how.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#8Is anyone still listening to esr? He seems to have gone off the deep end quite some years ago.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#9>Accordingly, the return on investment of spending on Windows development is falling. As PC volume sales continue to fall off , it’s inevitably going to stop being a profit center and turn into a drag on the business. Would that mean Microsoft could become like Apple on iDevices and force all Windows apps to be sold via the Windows Store for a 30% cut, to increase security of Windows and cut down most malware? What w…
Yes and no, at least for the next 5 or so years the cut will be much less, but lock-in will come, they already tried to go there before.
That is except if the US court messes up in the ethic vs. Apple case giving Microsoft a implicit green lighting for such a thing.
Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
#10Or, perhaps they said “Chromium compiles easily for Linux and we can get a little goodwill from corporate IT that wants to provide managed browsing for their Linux folks”. I don’t think the situation that the article provides is impossible, but at the same time I don’t think that Edge is a good indicator.
Yeah. Edge would be much more of an indicator if they hadn't just opted for a repackaging/repurposing of an available cross-platform engine. Nontrivial work, I'm sure, to port the Edge-specific parts of New Edge, but scarcely comparable to porting a complete legacy codebase.