The web/webapps/mobile helped lead to this era of "desktop PCs" (to include laptops) where the browser mattered more than the OS. It allowed Apple to become resurgent in the desktop market because OS compatibility mattered less than ever.

It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.

What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:

1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.

2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.

It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.

And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.

Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many virtual coworkers to a Microsoft Teams instance and you'll be handing off documents and chatting with the AGI workers pretty much as you would any other remote worker.

Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.

Yeah, this book was hugely influential

https://www.google.com/search?q=innovator%27s+dilemma&ie=UTF...

And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve.

Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.

No, consumers are not tech debt to Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.

The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.

In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.

I agree that a cheap MacBook and the steam machine are presenting a perfect storm situation for windows to lose some serious marketshare with casual/consumer users. Itll be interesting to see how or even if Microsoft reacts to this.

> Number one is that Microsoft just does not feel like a consumer tech company at all anymore.

At least in terms of Windows/Office, Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company. They've always been focused on corporate sales.

There have always been consumer-focused side areas, from Bob to Encarta to MSN to Xbox.

But Microsoft's bread and butter has always been corporations. I don't understand how the author thinks it was different at any time in the past.

2026 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop!

Not rick roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZSkM-QEeUg

> Considering Apple’s focus on consumers first

What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?

> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to

But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?

IDK I started running Bazzite on my workstation after Win11 died on me a couple weeks ago, and if it is the premier experience for Linux desktop gaming then we aren’t there yet. It is great as far as distros go, don’t get me wrong. But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died. I had to hack on it for a bit, then do it again with immutable OS patterns in mind. MS is certainly leaving an opportunity open for a new desktop OS. Would anyone dare offer a commercially supported consumer Linux OS?

I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.

If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.

People need to have realistic expectations of large corporations.

The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.

Author is using Microsoft and Windows interchangeably, this post is only about Windows.

Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.

The way Microsoft are ruining Windows makes it seem like enterprise users are the tech debt they want to get rid off. Like making their servers non-deterministic by serving random ads or leaking secret content to their AI. It makes sense that they would rather have their customers run Linux on Azure, so they don't have to do R&D for their own OS.

No, Microsoft products are the tech debt everywhere

A more interesting question to me (and one where MSFT employees here would have some insight) is to what degree is Windows' recent ABYSMAL fucking quality the result of AI, outsourcing, or bad management? You can also feel the difference in healthy employees vs. unhealthy, when you switch between something like VSCode (polished, fast, intelligent UI, not buggy, consistently improves) and Explorer (paleolithically slow, unstable, buggy, crashy, the worst version is always the latest).

Another point not mentioned in this article is that Windows desktops are incredibly slow these days.

I did some compilation tests on a 2025 Windows desktop with an i9 vs some MacBooks and a new top-of-the-line Windows machine can’t even keep up with a bottom-tier M1 MacBook Pro.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/compiler-performance-on-2025-devi...

Fifteen years ago every piece of hardware supported windows and windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi so a lot of novel and very custom software was written (guilty as charged). The good thing is that most of these still work, as windows has thankfully not fucked with the underlying Win32 libraries. The bad thing is that this one piece of custom software was probably written by someone of retirement age and it is probably what's running the company.

This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.