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by queenkjuul 204 days ago
It seems like they had the right idea with Windows 10 (our consumer OS is now just a loss-leader we put out for free as a way to market Office/OneDrive/Visual Studio etc) but they've completely about-faced with 11. Which yeah, could be a sign they're wanting to kill the consumer segment i guess.
1 comments
rincebrain 204 days ago
11, I think, is what happened when they wanted to push breaking changes that customers who pay for LTSC wanted to avoid for the entire lifetime of 10.

My assumption is that 10 was as you describe, and then 11 was motivated by wanting to make disruptive changes to squeeze the last juice from the consumer segment, and the "agentic OS" pivot is just the most recent gorilla in the room to squeeze the ever-drier sponge.

In particular, I would assume Microsoft sees writing on the wall with how so many people in younger demographics are using phones as primary devices and see full sized laptops and desktops as effectively legacy platforms they use at jobs, and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.

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thewebguyd 203 days ago
> and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.

I think you're right. They've been really pushing Windows 365 for businesses lately, and now have direct boot into W365. The new agentic stuff spins up temporary W365 instances to do it's thing.

They even recently made data model and report creation available in PowerBI web, something I never thought I'd see happen has PowerBI desktop was one of a few things still locking people in that ecosystem to Windows. They've publicly said they're committed to the web version now and web will get all the new features.

Microsoft is really pushing hard on "Windows as a service." The future of Windows isn't a locally installed OS. Windows is going to become just another app on every other platform. It's no coincidence that they renamed the remote desktop app to the "Windows app." Macs, chromebooks, phones, tablets, doesn't matter. No matter what you have, you will still be able to access Windows.

They do need to drive as many consumers off of it first though before pulling the rug and going subscription unless they want even more bad press.

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