
Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner - red_phone
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/news/companies/microsoft-restructuring-windows/index.html
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cm2187
To be honest it is not a bad thing. The new features in Windows have been
rather user hostile and regressions in term of usability and capabilities. I’d
be happy with them maintaining the security and adding features as required by
advances in hardware, but not treating the OS as a playground for radical
creativity and monetisation.

~~~
userbinator
Agreed completely. There's still a large group of people for which 2000/XP was
when the GUI was already nearly perfect, and everything after that was
downhill. As an OS I think Windows doesn't need any "new features" in the way
of radical GUI changes anymore, just continued bug fixes.

Ditto for a lot of other software; enough with the churn, stability is more
important.

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madenine
Little bit sensationalist.

Microsoft seeing profitability and growth from its cloud business, and
investing resources accordingly, doesn't mean its "putting Windows on the back
burner".

In its cloud and enterprise offerings MS has been adding support Linux and
open source in general. That mentality shift away from "MS products are for
Windows OS" is more what's going on than "MS doesn't care about Windows
anymore"

~~~
dbingham
I would really love to see them rewrite Windows on a unix or linux core the
way Mac did with Mac Os X. Having the software industry unified on a unix
standard would be amazing. It would free up so much development effort
currently spent making things cross platform (not all of it, but a lot of it).

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tyingq
Makes sense to me. They are ahead of AWS around K8S support. That kind of
thing, if they do it in multiple areas, will erode Amazon's current lead.
Azure is also noteably less expensive than AWS. They are already eating into
Bezos' market share.

Also the whole office 365 plan gets F500 companies already tied into Azure.
It's sort of like the drug dealer's "first one's free" tactic. They will, for
example, spend money on direct connect network for O365, which makes Azure
immediately more attractive. And their Active Directory info is necessarily
already federated to Azure.

~~~
013a
AWS is in a really weird place right now. They're powerful and have a bright
future, obviously. But it feels like its already become a legacy platform in
the cloud world.

Look at what they've released in the past two years... their AI stuff is
second rate compared to Google, and seems like its just there to check boxes.
Their serverless stuff beyond Lambda is overpriced, like Aurora Serverless and
Fargate. They're dragging their feet on EKS; it was announced 5 months ago, we
still don't have a release date, and the latest webcast (last week) they
showed made it seem either _really_ bad or _really_ unfinished, like you have
to involve CloudFormation to provision instances, manually manage VPC subnets,
etc.

Its a world where they have a core set of "legacy" building blocks that are
really good and well-tested (EC2, RDS, S3, SNS, SQS, a few others) but if you
go beyond those you enter uncharted territory that mostly exists to seem hip
and check boxes.

GCP, on the other hand, has legitimately powerful products at higher
abstraction levels like GKE, Firebase, DialogFlow, and their AI stuff. I know
less about Azure, but they seem to be doing well checking boxes and pushing
toward more higher abstraction levels with things like AKS, service fabric,
etc. Where's the actionable innovation at AWS?

~~~
tyingq
Agreed. Looking forward to when Azure, GCP, and AWS have more equal
marketshare. That will fix some current cloud shortcomings. Like stupid high
egress rates. Or Amazon's lack of a real Spanner competitor.

Though, I get some of the egress upcharge in GCP. Their global network is
worth some premium. Just not the current predatory pricing.

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JamesLeonis
PC gaming just shook a little. I have decades old games that still work
because Microsoft still supports Windows. uTorrent entirely exists because of
Microsoft's commitment to break-your-back-backwards-compatability in Windows.
DirectX is 25+ years of of PC gaming's history.

That could disappear like a console generation. That's a little disconcerting.

~~~
jpernst
On the contrary, I think perhaps the best thing for the preservation of the
history of windows gaming is for windows to stop changing. A frozen or
deprecated win32 API will give WINE (which is already quite good) breathing
room to catch up and fill in the gaps, without having to continuously cope
with the shifting sand of the latest experiments with windows. We'll be able
to run old windows games forever, rather than just as long as Microsoft deigns
to allow it. DOS games are fairly well preserved at this point for similar
reasons.

Of course, then we'll have to deal with whatever the next platform is, but
that's just the reality of the industry.

~~~
JamesLeonis
I understand where you are coming from. You are correct that an constantly
changing desktop experience is sub-optimal.

I fear we will lose the Microsoft as the silent steward of backwards
compatibility, DirectX support, getting manufacturers to make great hardware
drivers, the list goes on. It's this part of Microsoft that Windows will lose,
because it isn't customer facing.

I think the fallout is exactly the opposite of what you want. A de-emphasized
Windows means that the customer experience stuff is pushed forward while the
above suffers. The only bulwark against that is how deeply invested most
enterprise companies are in the Windows universe, driving many of those
behind-the-scenes fixes and changes.

> Of course, then we'll have to deal with whatever the next platform is, but
> that's just the reality of the industry.

Gaming on the PC was, in many was, a repudiation of that idea. We could have
one continuous open system that ran everything from old games to new games.
That's part of the point the emulation crowd wants to make as well. We don't
_have_ to live with platform churn.

But I'll be the first to admit Stallman was right. We collectively ceded this
power to a private corporation, and we could lose much of what we had because
we weren't good stewards.

EDIT: Spelling and grammar because I lack coffee.

~~~
seba_dos1
Actually... It's more common than not for an old game to not work correctly
(or at all) in recent versions of Windows without hacks and compatibility
wrappers. Try to run a DirectX 6 game on Windows 10. Today, WINE is closer to
be that "one continuous system" than Windows is.

~~~
JamesLeonis
A "continuous platform" was more aspirational than fully realized. I bet I
could find some of my DirectX9-era games of mine that won't run past Windows
8. But the lack of an hard artificial churn like consoles combined with an
open continuous API made PC gaming feel resilient in the face of the chaos.

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makecheck
Actually it shows that platforms really, really ought to be separated into at
least two entities: “stable foundation” and “playground for clueless UI
designers” or some other higher-level beast.

 _Any_ platform (Windows or not) in recent memory that underwent fundamental
UI changes would have been improved if we had separated the layers. Let us
continue to benefit from intelligent foundation improvements without being
forced to inherit other changes.

There are lots of ways to draw these lines but there needs to be at least one
line, below which software updates should have an entirely different meaning.

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Sk1pp
Kind of frustrating to hear that the largest OS by marketshare for desktop PCs
(82.68%) is going to be even less supported than it is currently. Doesn't seem
like thats going to be good news for security on the windows platform.

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers)

~~~
harigov
Err, that's not true. In fact, the only reason they can charge for that OS is
because they can keep it secure going forwards. It's not that Windows is being
dropped, its more like MS realized that there is a lot more potential to grow
in other areas, without being tied up to Windows.

~~~
Sylos
They have failed to keep it secure for as long as I can remember. They are
still able to sell it despite that, because people own Windows-only
applications.

~~~
harigov
I would have agreed if you were talking about Windows XP but Microsoft has
improved their security standing a lot since then. I think its a little
disingenuous to call them unsecure more than other systems in the industry.
Also the security environment has changed dramatically where monitoring and
alerting are becoming key components. I know for a fact that Microsoft is
investing heavily in those areas.

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chb
"Putting Windows on the back burner."

Microsoft's understanding of what an operating system is and how it
facilitates a user's interaction with their computing hardware has been
completely misguided over the last decade. So much so that I can't tell if
this headline describes something good, in the sense of salutary neglect, or
whether it's a euphemistic summation of what's been done since Windows 7
(taking a considered, and profoundly user-centric approach toward OS design
has been eschewed and given short shrift in favor of animated sprites in the
start menu, for example).

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nightski
I'm just a lowly small business owner, so my opinion isn't worth much. But if
this is true, I feel it is a huge mistake. It feels like number chasing at
best. Sure, Azure and online services (such as o365) are very profitable for
the company, but I feel this is largely because of Windows not in spite of it.

If Windows erodes share or loses it's edge with corporations I feel like Azure
& the online services will slide with it. But I don't have access to the data
Microsoft execs do and I could be completely wrong. Maybe Azure is mostly
Linux servers and o365 isn't really that important to their overall strategy.

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throwaway84742
They should take it off the burner altogether for Azure services and just use
Linux. I’m not saying they should not host eg exchange, sql server, share
point, and all their other stuff for customers. But much of their lower level
infra is built on Windows, and Windows is both not ideal for large scale
services and lacks the awesome FOSS ecosystem around it. And that’s before you
consider how painful and slow it is to develop for.

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shady-lady
for me to dev solely on windows, it needs:

1) coreutils + some other nix commands

2) iTerm2 equivalent(ConEmu/Cmder do not compare)

~~~
zadjii
Hey there, I'm actually on the windows console dev team. Any specific features
you're looking for from iTerm2? There's already hundred of items on the
backlog, but I'm always curious what things in particular people are looking
for.

~~~
porker
Can't answer iTerm2, but I use Cmder daily. I don't think the Windows Console
can (as I want for day-to-day usage)

1) show the Git branch in the prompt 2) display nice colours 3) open multiple
tabs

Looking forward to being proved wrong :) Cmder works well for me but I'd
rather have something core to Windows to use instead.

~~~
zadjii
Do you mean any of the following:
[https://i.imgur.com/zyC4A73.png](https://i.imgur.com/zyC4A73.png)

Colors can be customized, but changing them is a PITA so we made
(ColorTool)[[https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/Color...](https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/ColorTool)]
to make it a little easier

Auto updating the prompt isn't possible in CMD unfortunately. I do believe
it's possible in powershell, but that's not my cup of tea. I do have a batch
script that gets the branch and re-sets my prompt. You could create a git.bat
that calls such a script on every git command, or like me, create `vf.bat`
that I use to cd and update the prompt at once.

Also in this picture: cmd.exe running inside tmux in WSL. Coming soon to
Insider's Builds near you

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drinchev
What excites me is even the smallest possibility of Microsoft going towards
Linux desktop.

Let’s see.

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ovao
Note that this article may have a pre-roll ad with audio that plays
automatically.

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shmerl
Linux needs more push on the desktop.

~~~
tyingq
Increasingly, for desktop, the OS is just a launching pad for the browser.
There's a reason Chromebooks have such a big market share.

