The blog post sums up why users of Windows might want this.

However, this is not what Microsoft wants or needs. Microsoft is doing just fine by providing businesses what they need: a platform that can be tightly controlled and is easy to administer for large user counts.

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thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes 100%. All these discussions around Windows always miss the fact that consumers are not Microsoft's core customer, and haven't been for a long time (outside of GameDiv/Xbox).

The fact that consumers use Windows is a nice side effect for keeping mind share and to get people familiar and preferring windows when they enter the workplace. That's it. It's an accidental userbase that exists to be exploited.

Microsoft's money comes from Azure & Office(365). If you're not spending millions on enterprise support/software assurance (or whatever they call it these days) contracts, you pretty much don't exist to them.

	▲	oreally an hour ago \| parent [-]
		One thing you're missing out is their corporate strategy to treat their other products as some form of adspace.

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WillAdams 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dunno that it's that easy to administer --- time was, one of the concerns about NeXTstep was that it was so easy to setup/administer and so reliable that there was so little work involved, IT departments had to be downsized --- say rather that administering Windows is in-line w/ current budget projections/expectations.

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rawgabbit 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't believe businesses "need" Microsoft. Microsoft is entrenched in corporations for a variety of reasons and none of them because Microsoft is technically any good.

	▲	thewebguyd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a little bit of both. Microsoft's core product is minimizing operational risk, not the software itself. You can piece together your own stack using best of breed options, but you're going to pay double the price or more, and introduce a ton of friction and risk. Some businesses (everyone outside of the SV tech echo chamber) "need" Microsoft because its risk mitigation, which is the highest technical feature a business can ask for. Backwards compatibility, EntraID is good, and the compliance/purview stack solves nearly all regulatory headaches OOTB. OTOH yeah there's a bit of legacy entrenchment, both from Microsoft's monopolistic behavior but also because they were the only ones with an "IT In a box" solution for non-tech companies. Having a cohesive identity, security, and device management ecosystem that can scale to hundreds of thousands of endpoints with a few mouse clicks takes a lot of engineering effort that not many others were doing at the time.

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theandrewbailey 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> No telemetry, no spying, no ads, no AI, no .NET, nothing.

How will MS PMs meet their quarterly targets without Windows phoning home every moment someone is using it? \s