The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft. Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now.

As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.

▲

materialpoint 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it. What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.

▲

9JollyOtter an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.

If a corporate customer is running their stuff in the cloud they don't care if people are using Chromebooks/MacBooks/Linux to develop the software with. They just care that you are using Azure. Ultimately they want you to do everything through a web browser (just like google), even some dev environments are going that way.

Outside of corporations when interacting with non-tech people, none of them use a laptop. It is phone or tablet. A laptop running Windows is a work machine. I wonder what the stats are for home usage of Windows vs other things and honestly I don't believe a lot people are using a laptop/desktop running Windows.

> It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow.

I have a stripped down Windows 11 on my second disk (I will be removing it at some point). The OS is reasonably fast. I've removed most of the telemetry and other rubbish like the web search on desktop. So I can only assume it is that. I don't really care though anymore. I am running Debian on pretty much everything except for the work machine which I don't own.

▲

nubinetwork 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does

And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.

	▲	shevy-java an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling" They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.
	▲	ugubjjjgfchb an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

▲

shevy-java an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with you to some extent, but if Microsoft loses Windows here permanently then its desktop-centric control will also come to an end. So it would lose tons of opportunities here. I don't see Microsoft wanting to go that route really. It would basically commit suicide.