Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh...
by dspillett on Monday September 30, 2019 @05:39AM
(#21113266)
> In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing lately, but Windows is a glaring exception, it’s getting worse and worse at an alarming rate.
I think following the money shows part of why this is true.
It used to be that MS had three cash-cows: Windows, Office, SQL Server. Everything else, even Exchange, sharepoint, etc, on their own, made relatively little or a loss but were part of the larger ecosystem and therefore used to sell the other three.
It is now the case that the cash-cows are Azure (including AzureSQL), Office, SQL Server (on-prem). Windows is very much off the top list and is there mainly to sell the rest of the ecosystem and the fact that dumping it (or even just de-prioritising it too far) would look very bad.
That MS ecosystem is increasingly OS-agnostic and going forward this is going to continue to be the trend. SQL Server runs on Linux too now. VSCode is cross-platform and either that will continue to grow more of Visual Studio's features of VS itself will start to become cross-platform. Office has online versions which while having many notable feature gaps are pretty useable for many tasks and are getting more so. Much of what runs on Azure is not Windows either very much so (i.e. is running on Linux in VMs) or effectively so (running as app services where neither the dev nor the admin cares about the OS underneath as long as the right APIs are available).
Given the amount of effort desktop Windows must take, I'm sure they'd be happy to dump it sooner rather than later: let someone else deal with all that hardware compatibility faf and all those "real" man-on-the-street demanding-but-clueless end users on the desktop and all the security issues that come with them, keep server Windows going for Azure/similar (where the range of virtual hardware can be nicely constrained compared to real hardware variance and the security surface can be easier to manage too), and support other OSs in VMs as well as possible to make running them on Azure resource as friction free as it can be (aside from the friction of needing to pay!).
I think following the money shows part of why this is true.
It used to be that MS had three cash-cows: Windows, Office, SQL Server. Everything else, even Exchange, sharepoint, etc, on their own, made relatively little or a loss but were part of the larger ecosystem and therefore used to sell the other three.
It is now the case that the cash-cows are Azure (including AzureSQL), Office, SQL Server (on-prem). Windows is very much off the top list and is there mainly to sell the rest of the ecosystem and the fact that dumping it (or even just de-prioritising it too far) would look very bad.
That MS ecosystem is increasingly OS-agnostic and going forward this is going to continue to be the trend. SQL Server runs on Linux too now. VSCode is cross-platform and either that will continue to grow more of Visual Studio's features of VS itself will start to become cross-platform. Office has online versions which while having many notable feature gaps are pretty useable for many tasks and are getting more so. Much of what runs on Azure is not Windows either very much so (i.e. is running on Linux in VMs) or effectively so (running as app services where neither the dev nor the admin cares about the OS underneath as long as the right APIs are available).
Given the amount of effort desktop Windows must take, I'm sure they'd be happy to dump it sooner rather than later: let someone else deal with all that hardware compatibility faf and all those "real" man-on-the-street demanding-but-clueless end users on the desktop and all the security issues that come with them, keep server Windows going for Azure/similar (where the range of virtual hardware can be nicely constrained compared to real hardware variance and the security surface can be easier to manage too), and support other OSs in VMs as well as possible to make running them on Azure resource as friction free as it can be (aside from the friction of needing to pay!).