And MS as a company would probably be just fine with that. They could even port Office to Linux then. 70+% of Azure is Linux already, so Windows is rapidly becoming a costly liability in Azure. Office customers are captive, it's not like there's anything else available that could compete anyway, so they'll tolerate a lot of abuse. Until there's a realistic prospect of losing significant revenue, MS isn't going to give a shit. It's (tactically, but not strategically) the right thing to do. Win 10 with minor tweaks is going to easily last another decade or more. Who cares if Mac is better: LOB apps don't run there anyway.

>But should we realize in a couple years that this was overhyped and desktop OS and apps won't go away, everyone will have migrated to OSX or Linux if Windows quality continues to decline at that rate.

Windows still claims nearly 80% of desktop market share, while OS X has less than 15%. Linux is around 2%.

Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires it. Google requires it. Amazon requires it. Xbox Live requires it. Facebook requires it. Sony requires it. People are used to this. If you think this will affect Windows in any way, you probably read too much HN.

> Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires it.

macOS does not require a cloud account. Technically you don't even need one for iOS, but most people will create an Apple ID for the App Store (and I hope this distribution monopoly on iOS will eventually be broken up).

MacOS also prompts incessantly trying to get you to create and/or link a cloud account.

Neither Mac or Windows really requires an account but they make it an inconvenient path.

> MacOS also prompts incessantly trying to get you to create and/or link a cloud account.

Well, kind of. It seems to prompt me once per service, more or less. If I keep closing them, I've found that macOS does eventually shut up.

In a similar way for macOS enabling the offline root user has been under Network Account Server > Directory Utility forever. Microsoft is not alone in their logic here.

In a similar way for macOS enabling the offline root user has been under Network Account Server > Directory Utility forever.

Isn't that more for security reasons? Apple doesn't want users enabling the root account unless they know what they're doing, so they make it hard to find. (And, really—coming from someone who runs with SIP turned off—there's very little reason to enable that account.)

I wasn't exclusively referring to the online account here. Every update seems to break something in very stupid ways or change things around for no apparent reason. Friends working as admins in companies can't stop complaining over the last two updates. On every family meet up there's someone seeking tech support and I can just shrug and tell them the last version of Windows I really used was 7 and then my current dual boot alternative is still 8.1 which I need like twice a year. Which is immediately countered with "oh yeah I wish things were still like in XP or 7". And yes the most valid argument currently comes from enterprise customers depending on some expensive and important Windows only software. But that argument will only be true until it isn't anymore and then what? Since when has it ever worked out for some tech company to just stop investing in a product and try to milk the cash cow forever? Luckily Microsoft has a lot of other things going on like azure so it won't be the end of them, but that just brings us back to my initial comment: Is it the right move to let Windows go over the next decade and refocus, our might they regret it?

The contention might be on the time frame.

Desktop OS and apps won’t go away for the next 10 or 20 years by sheer inertia of the corporate market, and the halo effect on home users. And I guess the past month/years issues don’t affect business users (corporate managed desks will have any problematic feature disabled from the start)

“Everyone” migrating to OSX/linux won’t happen for many many years, even if they keep screwimg up home and hobbyist market. Corporate market is also their strong point, so money wise they’ll be fine with that.

PC gamers won't be switching to an Xbox, and so we require a desktop. It won't just be halo effect on home users, but ironically also Halo effect. The remastered collection being ported over as we speak, starting with Halo: Reach iirc.

And for small businesses, the analogous barrier is often "creative software". More and more administrative services used by businesses are moving online, and in some cases we're forced to use them whether we like it or not (for example, because certain tax/legal returns now have to be filed online using approved software). However, when it comes to creating reports, or artwork, or engineering schematics for a new building, or the 3D model you're going to be animating using WebGL on your new site, the dominant software is still almost entirely on desktops.

Some of that software is Windows-only. There are quite a few good products that run on Mac. Relatively little runs on open platforms like Linux. And for now, macOS has its own issues for long-term professional use, starting with Apple's reluctance to give any sort of concrete guarantees about support longevity. So that can be quite a barrier to migrating away from Windows for businesses.

It would be nice to think that in time Linux or other free platforms would fill the gap, but it's a chicken and egg problem. As an interesting contrast, within a very short time after Adobe went cloud/subscription with the dominant package of graphics/publication software, we had several smaller and more agile competitors entering the market at much more attractive (and non-subscription) price points: Sketch, the Affinity products, etc. We don't know to what extent any of these might already have been in development before and how much they were motivated directly by the shift to Creative Cloud, but we do know that the closest OSS equivalents have been around for years and made negligible impact, which doesn't bode well for the viability of Linux desktops as an alternative platform for "normal" business use (as opposed to, for example, specialist work like software development).

Simply: Excel.

The sheer intertia in businesses of all sizes using Excel will probably never completely go away. It will fade out over decades.

And proper excel (excel 2007!!!) is not on Mac OS , Linux or in the cloud.

The significance of Excel in large corporate environments is definitely underestimated by a lot of people who evangelise other platforms and software like LibreOffice as viable alternatives.

On the other hand, IME this is more of an enterprise-scale thing. Smaller businesses tend to be less firmly tied to existing software packages, and do less heavily customised work with Excel specifically, so there's likely to be less of a barrier for them to migrate.

Excel and COBOL will both still be around in 50 years. The entire global financial system depends on them, and will probably continue to do so at least until the Cyborg Uprising.

I am not at all in PC gaming community, but I had the impression that more and more people were moving to linux. In particular Steam for linux seemed to be praised a lot as a stable platform (up to a point where making non games run on Steam would be a viable option).

Would you see a future where gamers would embrace linux in enough numbers that it becomes a main platform ? I see their communities as willing to bear with some level of technical complexity as long as there are clear results, I was seeing the driver issues as the only real showstopper to have them move out of windows.

if home wireless printers ever become usable (reliably over wifi) i might then consider web based an option, but only because i know that will never happen

I’ve had flawless wireless printing on Mac OS with an HP printer for years. iOS too. Didn’t realize it was still flaky. Guess I got lucky with my combo.