[john_strinlai]

>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]

> 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.

[gundmc]

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.

[john_strinlai]

it would be awesome to see less windows-only software. i am all for it.

[Junk_Collector]

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]

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]

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.

[fc417fc802]

Out of curiosity why a custom distro instead of one of the major ones?

[Junk_Collector]

We have some special cases I can't go too much into that lend themselves well to rolling our own and stripping things down as much as possible.

[breve]

> 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]

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.

[cyberax]

> i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks

Autodesk Fusion runs in browser, and even SolidWorks has an online version. You were saying?...

> every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software

This has been happening for a while, actually. Typically they rewrite software as webapps, with a microservice-based backend.

> not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective).

Software gets rewritten all the time, often in the "Ship of Theseus" way. The next rewrite will just focus on moving stuff away from MS.

[pjmlp]

> Autodesk Fusion runs in browser, and even SolidWorks has an online version. You were saying?..

Mostly used for visualisation, rather than real work, especially given the browser limitations.

[danaris]

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.)