[artyom]

> Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.

This is a very HN take. MS is terrible or at best "second tier" on everything they do including gaming, they also lost the mobile race, they're very likely going to lose the AI race, but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.

There's a reason why writing .docx was one of the first proper skills that Claude got.

[pxc]

> This is a very HN take.

It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.

I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.

[tardedmeme]

Microsoft even admits they lost gaming, because their objective is now to catch Windows up to SteamOS - which, to remind anyone, is a Linux distro that runs a Windows emulator: https://bsky.app/profile/brunodias.bsky.social/post/3mkniszk...

yes, Wine is an emulator

[kelnos]

> yes, Wine is an emulator

I think it's more accurate to say that Wine contains some components that are emulators, not that it is an emulator. Sure, it has to emulate the x86 MMU's segmentation behavior, because Linux doesn't set it up the same way. It has to emulate x86 interrupt & CPU exception delivery, because Windows delivers those to applications in a different way than Linux does. For some very old programs, it has to emulate I/O ports and some device behavior. I think GDI and DirectDraw require emulation of a framebuffer and palette hardware.

But the vast majority of Wine's code is not emulation; most of it is a clean-room reimplementation of the win32 APIs, a PE/COFF loader, Windows registry, etc. All of those parts are implementations of API contracts and binary format parsers, not emulation, in the same way that GNUstep is a reimplementation of NeXTSTEP/Cocoa, and not an emulator. (The main difference being that Wine can run Windows executables unmodified, whereas GNUstep expects you to recompile/relink from source. That is a sizeable difference, but not an emulator-sized difference.)

And yes, the computer science definition of "emulator" doesn't specify hardware: it's simply a system that reproduces the externally observable behavior of another system. But if we follow that definition too closely, then things that are clearly not emulators become emulators. Like musl and glibc are emulators of the C standard library (or of each other?), Android is an emulator of the Java virtual machine, and Mesa's software renderer is an emulator of OpenGL or a GPU (that latter bit is tempting, but it really isn't a GPU emulator). At this level, "emulator" just means "abstraction layer", which makes it pretty useless as a term if we take it that far.

So I think "WINE Is Not an Emulator" is true. It contains some bits that are absolutely emulators, but it is not, in its entirety, an emulator, and emulating isn't the function of the bulk of its code.

(I'm not trying to be pedantic here; this was actually a fun thought exercise about emulation in general and Wine in particular.)

[Avamander]

> but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.

I can't wait for the anti-trust lawsuits. M365 and O365 are already super shady in terms of being able to migrate out or be interoperable with other solutions. "Accidental" roadblocks almost everywhere.

[artyom]

There won't be any.

I'm old enough to remember this happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

Basically, Microsoft furiously bribed their way into formally standardizing the utterly broken MS Office formats, so EU and potentially other regulators couldn't mandate them to be "interoperable" with existing standards (e.g. OpenDocument, based on OpenOffice, which was on its normal way to become standardized with no fast tracking and no bribing). They even called it "Office Open" to foster confusion.

They can do whatever they want and get away with it because a big part of their business model is, much like Oracle and SAP, based on bribing government bodies across the world.

[dewey]

Yes, but this time there’s the additional driving force of countries trying to become more self reliant and not get locked into US software giants (France and Germany for example). A long way to go, but it’s gaining more traction than the past half-assed attempts.

[LeCompteSftware]

FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.

Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.

As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.

It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.

[jabedude]

> and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science

What is this a reference to? Fuchsia?

[jitl]

They're referring to the Windows kernel; see the preceding paragraph on the Windows kernel - the three general purpose OS families are Linux, macOS, Windows.

Personally I think not enough credit to macOS here; Apple's Mach/XNU has been microkernel flavored since the NeXT days and many subsystems run in userspace like Windows.

[wpm]

Last years Crowdstrike outage never hit any of the macOS computers with CS installed because on macOS the Crowdstrike agent runs entirely in userspace thanks to the Endpoint Security framework.

Really the security of macOS is probably the best of all of the desktop OSes, and as annoying as it can be.

[tardedmeme]

Can you think of any downsides to the approach of forcing secure boot on all users for security?

[jitl]

You should state your take instead of inviting me to speculate about what it is.

[raincole]

People have been saying that MS was becoming obsolete for at least two decades. And a few times, it did seem heading to obsoletion: first when Google Docs launched, and second when Windows Phone failed.

And yet we're where we are. MS is still one of the most important corporations. Perhaps the most important one if you only count enterprise usage.

[rafaelmn]

Is this even an issue these days ? I thought GSuite was good enough for most office work for a very long time now ?

[artyom]

I'd say that for the majority of old-school, established, non-tech organizations (oil, steel, manufacturing, governments, etc), it's not only an issue but it's the de-facto standard, along with Exchange, ActiveDirectory and all the nice things that come with it.