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| ▲ | jerf 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "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. To put it another way, the thresholds where people get annoyed enough to quit are highly correlated to each other. If individuals on HN are posting "I don't want to switch, I've been working this way for decades now, but Windows has crossed the line for me, I've switched to Linux, and it was easier than I thought it would be", then corporations and governments are having very similar deliberations internally. This is probably a more accurate model for how "influencers" seem to work than the idea that some crazy guy in your organization falls in love with Product X and evangelizes it internally. I'm sure that happens and is a real force, but this correlation-of-experience effect is probably bigger on the whole. If Product X was good enough to make an evangelist internally, or more germane to this conversation, to make some a mortal enemy of it internally, it's usually because it was a good enough or bad enough product to be able to do that in the first place, and eventually everyone will figure it out in exactly the same way, just later. 20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. If Microsoft responds correctly that might be good, but if they just decide to rest on their laurels and extract whatever value they can out of Windows while they can, Windows would never last 20 years of that. Even the slowest organizations can move faster than that. After all, to cut Microsoft's revenues off at the knees, they don't need to remove every last Windows 2000 server in their backoffice they can't upgrade, they need to cut out just the majority of desktop licenses. | | |
| ▲ | thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >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 years at least, etc. not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective). time will tell! i have first-hand experience with how fast banks move, so i will stick by my 20 year minimum. happy to see otherwise, though. in any case. what i replied to was a claim that windows is in "significant danger" today. it is not. | | |
| ▲ | thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | breve 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 Up front they won't need to do a full rewrite. They'll only need to make it work well enough under Wine. At a source level, tools like Avalonia's xpf make porting WPF apps to other platforms easier: https://avaloniaui.net/xpf | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | of the stupid enterprise-y software like quickbooks, solidworks and other proprietary stuff that i have used, they barely work well enough under native windows. not to mention, even sticking them in a windows VM voids any support contracts. |
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| ▲ | gundmc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In 20 years I expect basically all of these to move to web-based interfaces and away from thick clients. You're already seeing graphics heavy use cases like CAD do this (Onshape has been hugely popular and is cloud native on Linux). Even behemoths like SAP are increasingly web enabled through fiori. | | | |
| ▲ | Junk_Collector 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's an interesting case to me. The company I work for has been shipping systems on windows since the 90's despite pretty consistent requests from customers to ship hardware on Linux. 2 years ago we started creating our own Linux distribution and this year started shipping products on it. We still ship a lot of stuff on Windows 11, but that market share is starting to shift now. 10 years from now I could see us completely moved to our Linux distro. Now, what's actually interesting is that it wasn't customer requests or efficient capital allocation that drove this. Microsoft effectively forced us to do this against our will by a combination discontinued products and handling of Windows 11 and now that we've spent the capital we won't be going back. | | |
| ▲ | ethbr1 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | To me, this is the way linux wins, if it does. Product teams deciding it's easier to ship on + customers having enough linux familiarity (from their other projects). And the current crop of Microsoft people on the Windows team don't seem to understand building a platform in the way 90/00s Windows teams did. It's clear MS moved a lot of their smartest people over to work on Azure products. | |
| ▲ | grujicd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can't abandon Windows because of software X, Y, Z. Over the years vendors move to multiplatform as more and more customers ask for it. These changes are slow but steady. And one day you find out that the last "must have" software is not limited to Windows anymore. That's when the dam breaks. |
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| ▲ | danaris 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It doesn't take all the specialized Windows-only line-of-business software being rewritten to have massive defections to Linux happen. The market you're describing is real, and very significant—but I don't think it's even a majority of Windows users. If so, it's a small one. And imagine what even 30-40% of all Windows sales disappearing over the course of 2-3 years would do to Microsoft. To Windows as a platform. Then imagine what would happen if it was 50-70%. The former, I would describe as "a disaster". The latter, I would describe as "apocalyptic". (Y'know. For Microsoft as a company. Not in general.) |
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| ▲ | Orygin 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Still, a lot of those woke up from a profound sleep about digital sovereignty and are now contemplating leaving the American software ecosystem. It won't be sudden, until it is | |
| ▲ | thesuitonym 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And how many times this year have you seen a headline with some European country's government starting to migrate away from Microsoft? | | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | a couple? and as far as i know, none of them have completed the transition. it is great that some are starting, seriously. but windows is not in significant danger as of today. |
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| ▲ | jon-wood 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | criddell 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My daughter works at a bank in Canada and she was issued a Macbook. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai an hour ago | parent [-] | | surprising! what i know of canadian banks is admittedly little, so they might be moving faster than the banks i am familiar with. may i ask what department? do you know if it is managed by intune? | | |
| ▲ | criddell an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't know much. She isn't allowed to talk about any operational details. She just started there a few weeks ago. And Canadian banks aren't known for moving fast. They are pretty conservative (at least the big chartered banks are). |
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| ▲ | olyjohn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most people dont even use the operating system. They look for the apps menu, then click what they want to run. Most people can switch between OSes easier than you think because there really isn't that much difference in how they work on the surface. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | users are one component, but you are still ignoring/forgetting the rest. user management, file management, security, windows-specific software, auditing requirements, required capital investment, lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on. |
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| ▲ | jon-wood 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine, or only occasionally having done so when it was absolutely necessary. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine i would love to see your numbers for this. what does "increasing percentage" mean? 1% -> 2%? 10% -> 20%? i teach at a college level, in tech, and would estimate ~5% of incoming students have any experience with something other than windows on a pc, at best. outside of tech, i would estimate ~2%. |
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| ▲ | homarp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | and then something like COVID happens and they change fast. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | expanding your vpn to support more employees working from home is much easier than replacing hundreds of thousands of machines, all of the windows-only software that runs on those machines, training all of your employees on a new operating system, cancelling all of your existing contracts... you get the point. | | |
| ▲ | homarp 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | well, it happened with Teams meetings replacing fancy CISCO equipments. It happened with all the vpn+shared drives buried to just use SPO. different experience,I guess. Did your employees got trained? or just sent the link to 3 'online trainings'? Managers manage to switch to Mac seamlessly. I am sure the rest will follow with cheaper macs now available. And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian) | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | >And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian) office is a tiny, almost negligible, piece of the puzzle. quickbooks, solidworks and other cad software, bespoke software, security software, user management, permissions management (replacing active directory), contractual obligations, the millions of dollars required in implementation, the millions more dollars required for increased user support, and so on... but, again, just to reiterate: i am disputing that windows is in "significant danger" today. |
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