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People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

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Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#311

Post by lowbloodsugar »

tremon wrote: post #140
herf wrote: post #119

Apple makes a nice distinction between their "app layer" (iCloud drive and Messages, etc.) and the OS login. This would work fine for Windows power users, and for the most part Windows has already had this (your "store" login). But to require the cloud to replace your login, the cloud has to be essential to the functioning of Windows and you have to explain the security implications clearly, and it's not clear that a…

why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password? FAFAIK, all characters that are allowed in a user password are also allowed in device PIN codes. Knowing Microsoft, I'm sure there's domain policies to alter/restrict this. And the idea behind it is sound: that PIN is tied only to a single device, meaning that even if someone watches you enter your device passcode (or uses a keylogger), they ca…

Because nobody would use the same pin for different devices. This is a farcical argument.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#312

Post by kuerbel »

john_strinlai wrote: post #286
kuerbel wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol... That was the situation at the end of December. Note that projects like these often fail not for technical reasons, not even cost, but political pressure from other parties, pressure from people that worked for ages in the administration and, well, have some problems to adjust to new software. There is also a push from the German state to switch to open s…

thanks for the link! it is unfortunate that they do not provide numbers, just percentages. i would love to know exactly (or roughly) how many machines "80%" is. and the "80%" seems slightly misleading, because it is 80%, not including the tax administration . i have no idea what overall % of machines are inside or outside of the tax administration. it also appears like this is mostly about software like office, rathe…

Migrating to linux will be started this year. I think a big step is also replacing sharepoint with Nextcloud.

Iirc they have 30k workstations.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#313

Post by criddell »

john_strinlai wrote: post #104
jon-wood wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't suddenly replace them, but in a lot of cases you can find that over an extended period more and more people choose the MacBook option from IT rather than the Windows one.

most people are not willing to learn an entire new operating system for no reason, though. this might happen in tech-based companies, sure, but banks? accounting firms? ive never seen them offer macbooks. this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government). point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.

My daughter works at a bank in Canada and she was issued a Macbook.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#314

Post by thewebguyd »

jerf wrote: post #146
john_strinlai wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gradually and then suddenly. governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines. 20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" t…

"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow. It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away. T…

> lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it

Not sure about big enterprises, but I already see this happening in the mid-size, non tech company market.

I'm an IT manager and has been a sysadmin/ops for my entire career, and the past ~4 years I've been seeing a pretty consistent shift toward companies my company does business with deploying more and more macs. Windows is still dominant in my industry, but the cracks in the wall are widening. It's gotten to the point that I'm genuinely surprised now when I see Windows when someone screen shares.

Apple silicon is just too good and the generations coming into the workforce now don't have a "default" windows familiarity that we used to have. They're coming in needing to be trained on how to use a PC in general, windows or not, having used nothing but chromebooks and mobile OSes.

Now, Office OTOH is more entrenched than windows. Even the macshops I interact with are all on M365. Macs are managed with Intune, users & SSO with Entra, Defender for EDR, and of course the office apps. And that's why Microsoft probably isn't as afraid as it seems when it comes to Windows. Even without Windows lock-in, there is very real M365 lockin that is far more entrenched than the endpoint OS.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#315

Post by thewebguyd »

john_strinlai wrote: post #159
jerf wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow. It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away. T…

> 20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few…

> unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks

They already have. You can't buy QuickBooks for desktop anymore unless you want Enterprise, the expensive $4k+/year subscription. They dumped the Pro/Pro Plus and moved all those users to QuickBooks online.

And now they've launched Intuit Enterprise Suite in an effort to move the QBE customers into Online. The writing is on the wall there, desktop is going away.

It's also happening in more specialized areas too. I work in waste management/recycling, and this industry was traditionally windows heavy with thick clients on desktops. Even the truck scale software is moving to web interfaces, as are the dispatching and asset management.

OS increasingly doesn't matter for most knowledge work.

Yeah, there are going to be industries that will probably never move, certainly not within a 20 year timeline, but there are a ton that are moving or have moved entirely to SaaS and web apps.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#316

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

gregates wrote: post #299

I was a MS-DOS 2.0 user as a child. I have always preferred windows to OSX. I used WSL for years at companies where every other engineer had a MacBook. Last weekend I finally started dual-booting Arch Linux as a trial. Yesterday I deleted my windows partition. Too late, Microsoft.

I’m still on the Linux Mint part of the transition from Windows and I just for no reason see going back.

I’m dealing with sub-par Office on my work machines. But as MS moves/forces Office into online modes and I’m hoping that it’ll just be an electron app I can pull up.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#317

Post by Krasnol »

varispeed wrote: post #155
Rapzid wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a sizeable background in Linux system engineering.. I prefer Windows to MacOS. It's IMHO a better desktop now with the edge snap tile layout and etc. Excellent device compatibility. And I get my linux environment needs satisfied via WSL2 these days. But damn if they don't get in their own way. I have my own Pro licenses, and even with Pro turning off ads and features is text book whack-a-mole: * Frequ…

Don't forget the search that doesn't work. You have app "X" installed? You type X and it doesn't find it, but gives you irrelevant results about X.

...where we get to one of the best things about Windows: there is a free (and probably open source) tool for everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#318

Post by thesuitonym »

john_strinlai wrote: post #88
sidkshatriya wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.

> gradually and then suddenly. governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines. 20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" t…

And how many times this year have you seen a headline with some European country's government starting to migrate away from Microsoft?

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#319

Post by ctoth »

ryandrake wrote: post #255
Rapzid wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a sizeable background in Linux system engineering.. I prefer Windows to MacOS. It's IMHO a better desktop now with the edge snap tile layout and etc. Excellent device compatibility. And I get my linux environment needs satisfied via WSL2 these days. But damn if they don't get in their own way. I have my own Pro licenses, and even with Pro turning off ads and features is text book whack-a-mole: * Frequ…

This might be obvious, but all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing. This is the biggest generalized danger in computing today: That OS (and device) manufacturers have gotten it in their heads that it's OK for them to have a strong say in what your computer runs. User doesn't want X, Y, or Z running on his computer? TOUGH. We are going to…

All true, and yet: Windows accessibility actually works. I use a screen reader daily. Linux a11y is complete dogshit — AT-SPI2 is unreliable, Orca is barely maintained, Wayland broke what little existed.

I need something that actually works. When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite its working desktop stack and it's still, ten years later, not useable?

ADHD-Driven development might be fine if you can see your system. When you can't, being at the whims of some teenager chasing the new shiny is just frustrating.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#320

Post by branko_d »

Someone1234 wrote: post #188
varispeed wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the search that doesn't work. You have app "X" installed? You type X and it doesn't find it, but gives you irrelevant results about X.

Windows' search has been broken for multiple generations now. Some people inside Microsoft seemingly even know , that's why the PowerToys team created "PowerToys Run." A Windows Search that actually basically functions correctly. People act like it sudden was broken in Windows 11 when in reality it never worked correctly in 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 either. Instead of fixing it, they've only made it worse. It seems like nobod…

If memory serves, Windows 2000 was the last version where search worked reliably. It was a simple linear search through files which could take a while on larger folders, but was reliable and predictable since it did not rely on a background indexing service which seems to get stale or just plain wrong most of the time.

If I search for “foo”, I’d like to get all files containing “foo” please, without a shadow of a doubt that some files were skipped, including those that I have recently created. I still can’t get that as of Windows 11!

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