The article left out the most important question: are there any lasting negative consequences for Microsoft due to all these accidents? The answer is likely no. And that's all the the shareholders care about sadly. So this will continue to happen imo. Those Quality Assurance testers won't be coming back any time soon.
They seem to be very slowly losing to Apple on the laptop / productivity market and first signs of losing to Linux on gaming.
In the same way that their incompetence has been very slow to move the needle, once they lose the market it’s going to be almost impossible to get it back.
Ordinary folks are going more and more chromebooks these days, those are the "low cost laptops" that are on the shelves at your local bestbuy/curry's/elgiganten etc;
For everything more than that: the Macbook Air is equivalent or cheaper.
People seem to continue the lie that Apple hardware is more expensive, yet I just closed a deal on a business thinkpad (T14s Gen6) which was double the price and 2/3rds as performant, because we're a Windows shop and we don't buy Apple. Forgive my annoyance here but someone told me that "at least we don't buy expensive Macs" after we signed the invoice and it really got under my skin because it's legitimately half the price for more power. Completely blinded by ignorance.
Upgrades might be expensive, sure, but anything of any quality has always been like-for-like with Apple being cheaper on the low-spec end.
The consumer grade market where Windows used to dominate is having their lunch totally stolen by Chromebooks and Android Tablets. (More-so by Tablets I would argue).
Not on European markets, Chromebooks only leave the likes of Media Market after endless promotions trying to get rid of them.
We don't lie, we don't live in US, with US salaries, some European countries still get 800 euros as average salary, not to mention all the other even more poorer regions around the globe.
Although the same is true in the UK. So which Europe are we talking about?
Kids get Chromebooks in school, most people seem to be content with a tablet. I have a hard time finding anyone who has a laptop <8 years old now (that isn't a company laptop).
I find it ironic that you’re talking about the cost of things, and that somehow the laptop with the premium operating system that costs money and requires more expensive hardware due to being bloated is somehow more inexpensive in your country than a Chromebook or a tablet.
Chromebooks and tablets are mostly useless as general computing devices.
Chromebooks only got a market chance thanks to US school system, and tablets, naturally Android ones that we're talking about here, are mostly consuming devices.
Hence why wealthy folks get Apple, they aren't getting Chromebooks and tablets either, when money is no concern.
By the way, you can buy new PC hardware below one month salary, that will get extended as long as possible.
what do you think people are doing with their computers that they cannot do with a tablet or Chromebook?
Like buddy, I’m not trying to argue with you here - clearly we live in different societies with different purchasing demographics. General computing devices for me and for you are completely different things than they would be for my mother or anyone else in the general population.
For the overwhelming majority of people, they may own a computer to file taxes to watch content and to play non-intensive little games (not the AAA spectacle the most gamers player).
They do not need a compiler, they usually do not need Microsoft Word, and they do not need to install random executables from the Internet.
What do you think they need to do that cannot be served by a tablet?
Schools are largely using chromos and chromebooks today (in my understanding across the countries where I have seen students in the last 8 years; so: Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and The UK).
Since having access to a web browser is significantly easier than Microsoft.
Actually, it was the same playbook Microsoft had in the 90s.
I bought a Lenovo AMD laptop a year or two back with 32GB RAM & 1TB HDD for around £650. The upgrade cost alone for that RAM/storage is £600 for a macbook air.
"first signs" for sure; I think / suspect the next big step for Valve would be to release a desktop gaming system. If it has a browser and "native" Discord it has the potential to take a chunk off the PC gaming market.
Yeah imo the average person will never install an OS, they will only use the one that comes on a device. So for Linux to go mainstream it has to come preinstalled.
And the Steam Deck is clearly that. I’d happily recommend the deck to normal non tech users. It’s just that good. One of the things I think they did exceptionally well is using a read only image based OS, meaning the system is always in a known state, and if an update ever breaks something, the bootloader shows the previous working images letting you boot back in to those and wait for the broken update to be yanked and replaced. You never need the user to reinstall after a broken OS.
I don't think Linux will ever fully take over gaming regardless of effort unless competitive multiplayer game companies decide to give up on assuming total control over your system in order to make cheaters undetectable to the average gamer*.
It would require that a Linux based OS was released which allows games companies, in a standardised way, to take full control over the system. And at this point, it won't be a Linux distro, it will instead just be like Android. I think calling that a market takeover would be similarly thin and insignificant as calling android a "Linux takeover of the mobile OS market".
But this isn't to say that Microsoft won't lose the market share to "Gamedroid" or whatever, it just won't be losing it to Linux.
* As has been demonstrated, KLA and similar technologies do help make cheating more difficult and require more resources. But, as the cheating industry's pocketbooks make clear, cheating hasn't stopped, it has just become more discreet such that most players simply don't notice when they're losing to cheaters.
A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.
The only person who would say otherwise has clearly never written anything on that level on Windows. It's not just uneasy: it's Sisyphean. The code-signing signature you need alone is an order of magnitude more difficult to obtain than the development burden of an appropriately defensive kernel module.
We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
> A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.
That's cool, but you can't enforce that the rest of the kernel hasn't been modified with that kernel module. You need a chain of trust.
> We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
> Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
It doesn't support it with KLA. Bypassing this kind of anti-cheat on Linux is relatively trivial compared to windows with KLA.
> Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
There's not much Kernel Level malware singed in Windows (drivers have more scrutiny for whatever that's worth). Regardless, the point is that companies using KLA rely on the relative difficulty of circumventing protections implemented in a signed kernel, running signed drivers, on a machine where there is some chain of trust.
You don't need to take my word for it, Tim Sweeney said it himself (using dirty innuendos and weasel words, but anyway). EAC supports Linux, but doesn't utilise KLA (for many reasons), and doesn't make the same claims about protection as it does on Windows.
Perhaps not, but Linux desktop marketshare doubled in 2024. It is still minuscule, but it doesn't take much for a movement like this to take off. Microsoft continues to make Windows 11 impossible to install for the average user up to and including not all that rare scenarios where it cannot be installed at all.
Conversely, 15 minutes to install, fully patched, and ready to go Linux distro is a hugely attractive alternative to Windows. There are 3 viable gaming distros, and the underlying tech continues to evolve. It is already invisible to most games.
Yeah most games, except the ones which rely on KLA.
There aren't _that many_ games in that realm, but most PC gamers play at least one of them a lot.
Without effective KLA support (which would require a locked down Linux aka Gamedroid, for reasons I explain in my other comments) the best you can do is support these mostly non-competitive-multiplayer games. If you have friends who play lots of games, you'll quickly find most of them play at least one game which requires KLA.
Depends who pushes it and how - Steam (Valve) have the clout to if not to "take over gaming" at least turn it into a duopoly on the desktop/laptop from an OS point (from a game client point of view there is already Steam.....and way....over here everyone else).
I don't think anyone else does.
There isn't any technical reasons preventing it, PS5's are based on a heavily modified BSD - it requires a single vendor to standardise and support the platform with enough resources/commitment to do it properly.
Sure valve can make Gamedroid a reality, but Valve seems to be on the side of not using KLA themselves.
And, again, Gamedroid != Linux and PS5's OS is not anything like normal BSD. In both cases (hypothetical Gamderoid and current Console OSes and Windows) the game companies are granted a controlled runtime environment. Linux will not support any effective KLA without a third party providing a blessed (all drivers must be signed, secure boot, etc) distro.
The reasons are:
* PITA to support different distros (although not infeasible).
* Trivial for anyone to just write their own kernel module which your KLA is blind to.
* Trivial to modify how your KLA driver hooks Linux to make it blind to the cheats.
More than anything, once people realize that they can be fine without MS because 5-10% of the non-Apple market has done so (and the alternatives has figured out the kinks with the mass influx of users) it could move from a trickle to an avalanche.
The upside is that MS has the reserves and fallbacks to get their shit together if they realized that they are faced with a bad sitation and those that can't leave will get better products.
I think they already know and have been trying not to lose to Apple for a long time, as evidenced by their awkward attempts to embrace “good design” and “cool”.
Microsoft’s value is Excel+ Azure. And as long as they can sell Excel, they can sell a bunch of the other stuff at a cost so low that leaders have trouble saying no to janky Teams and other software.
And the Office package is a very attractive offering. $36 / user / month and they get managed emails, chat, office, SSO, cloud storage, Windows, etc - basically everything that used to be the domain of a sysadmin.
The competitors are all fragmented; Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack, Teams or Discord and doesn't do hardware management as far as I'm aware unless you use Chromebooks.
> Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack
Google is up to a dozen versions of chat, the current incarnation is called Google Meet which includes a video akak Zoom type service as well as a Slack-type chat service.
lol you've 'talked' about switching. I'm really surprised that any startup would be on Teams in the first place. I get enterprises but for startups I would think other tools make more sense (Slack, etc...).
My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.
I can’t imagine going back to a time where I couldn’t just throw an excel file or ppt in a discussion and get collaborative editing straight away.
At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?
The other day I clicked "share" on a PowerPoint presentation saved in OneDrive, and it reverted to a version several hours old, losing that work. This is a typical experience using any of the Office products. Copilot is not "good at minutes and transcription" by any stretch of the imagination. It cannot understand a _simple_ word I say, with an RP-British accent, let alone many of the acronyms and terms used in industry.
Fortunately we have already switched away from Teams to Slack for chat, but since the best way to win is not to play, I just write text in vim and presentations in Keynote. Fortunately I have approximately no need for spreadsheets that aren't simple lists, though that appears to be the lock-in.
I'd rather use literally anything else. Google's stuff is probably best, but Quip was also fine.
Visio was built to be acquired by Microsoft. It was the best office family app pre-acquisition. Every subsequent release is worse than the one before it.
The only thing I really like about Teams is that the AI-optimized audio codec is the only video call audio that doesn’t cause some people’s voices to become physically painful to listen to.
Even loading a command prompt or the calculator takes more than 3 seconds on Windows 11 so maybe they've just lowered the bar so much it passes internal testing.
Well, with the windows 10 support ending, it is different now. To some extent staying on windows requires more effort than switching, which is an interesting place to be. I have "switched" people to macos or linux that before would not even bother and hear such stories everywhere. The linux ecosystem has matured and windows is no longer the easy/bugfree experience that was. Eg I tried to install linux and windows to some brand new hardware couple of years ago, linux worked out of the box while for windows I had to go troubleshooting mode and find/download/install drivers manually. 10-15 years ago or so it was always the opposite.
> Eg I tried to install linux and windows to some brand new hardware couple of years ago,
I realized this too. I recently installed a dual boot Fedora/Win11. The fedora installation was literally pressing 4 times "Next" and was done after 5 minutes.
Windows took well over 1 hour (offline account) and installing drivers and taming edge & co was over 2 hours at the end.
I happen to use Windows on both personal and work laptop. Some of the bugs I see exist across Home and Enterprise version. Sleep remains a nightmare on Windows, and yes across laptops made by different manufacturers. I have created tickets and this, and IT doesn't have a solution.
I have decided that my next personal laptop definitely won't run Windows, and if I am allowed to ask for a Mac machine at work in the future, I'll jump at that opportunity.
That would mean two fewer Windows licenses and less usage of related products (good riddance, Edge!). And I am sure I am not the only one who is thinking about all this.
But of course I have no idea if that matters in the grand scheme of things -- after all, many people tolerate these bugs just like they tolerate all the ads by Microsoft, Google, Meta etc.
Every platform has some hardware that has issues with sleeping. I've had numerous Linux machines that entirely fail to resume often, this current MacBook I'm on fails to properly reconnect things on USB hubs after a resume, etc. The grass is always greener.
Try sleep study on your current machine. I had an issue with one machine constantly waking from sleep. Lots of other tools couldn't clue me into what was going on and why the system was actually waking. Sleep study pointed exactly to the device causing problems, disabling it from waking the system solved my sleep problems on that device.
