True, but increasingly marginal. Many schools have adopted Chromebooks (Linux in disguise) and even the MS Office suite has largely moved online.

MS is on a mission to go after schools that have adopted Chromebooks. If your school is using Chromebooks you can expect all kinds of stick-and-carrot tricks to try to get you to switch (back).

They invented the hilarious Surface SE, so bad it can't even run all Metro/Store apps. Worse than a Chromebook in every way.

Everything you want to install has to be approved by Microsoft

I agree. Google Classroom exploded during the pandemic in my local school systems.

Enterprises are moving to Workspace from 365. I hope they drive each other's prices to the bottom. :)

"Enterprises are moving to Workspace from 365" not in any meaningful numbers.

> not in any meaningful numbers.

While I agree, it has to start somewhere. As a customer of both, I appreciate the competition from 1-2% per year[0] growth.

[0]https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...

Nah... We've had Workspace for a long time and there are still users that adamantly refuse to use Google Apps over MS. They actually have good reasons as well. Since Google just has web apps only there's always extra steps uploading all the office docs they get from other businesses.

We tried blowing Office 2013 away on everyone's machines after being told most users didn't think they needed it. Now, a few months later 90% of our users have asked for a 365 license.

What typically happens from what I can tell is that most businesses just end up having a mix of both 365 and Workspace.

Great feedback!

Excel specifically seems to have the most attachment among our users.

Excel has programming capabilities (VBA) that are used a lot, and I don't think they're available in the online version (are they?)

A lot of people are stuck on Windows or MacOS because of one killer app - Photoshop, a CAD/CAM package, a video or audio editor, or some proprietary bit of business software. Many of these applications have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dev time invested in them and it just isn't realistic to expect an open source alternative to compete.

I'm in that boat, but I don't especially mind. I run Windows because it allows me to run Fusion 360, but Windows Subsystem for Linux gives me a full Linux dev environment. A younger me would have got angry about it, but present me accepts that platform lock-in effects are very strong; fortunately for Linux, it dominates every new category of platform. I sincerely doubt that anyone will ever develop a new proprietary OS from scratch, because the business case for putting a pretty UI on Linux is overwhelming.

Sure but we were talking about students at schools here, where this is usually not a problem.

I hope that Photopea (browser-based Photoshop) can gain traction to break that dependency.

I know the evidence is that plenty of people are totally happy with applications running in a browser -- Office Online, Google Sheets, etc. are compelling evidence -- but I strongly prefer dedicated and native applications for something I'll be spending a lot of time using.

I'm not even necessarily blaming this on the performance difference, although that is a pertinent topic, but just the mental structure of something I'm using living in a browser tab rather than actually running on the computer.

Installable web apps would give you a workaround for that wouldn’t it?

They are still bound by the constraints of the Web.

For example WebGL 2.0 (2009 hardware), WebGPU (2015 hardware), any GPU capabilities after 2015? You ain't going to get them.

If the parents are talking about choice, then forced Chromebooks are not choice. The students must use them, and schools like them because they are very locked down and centrally observable.

But the student has no choice

> Chromebooks (Linux in disguise)

I don't think a win for Chromebooks counts as a win for Linux, except in maybe the most narrowly technical sense.

Go on the Chromeos subreddit and you'll see a lot of first time Linux users breaking open the dev tools to run Linux apps to get more functionality.

Its honestly quite interesting seeing new users from that perspective.

Yes, but many schools lock down their Chromebooks so that you can't run Linux on them. I somehow managed to unenroll mine last year, but I have no idea how I did, and to make it worse I had to switch out my Chromebook after it stopped working.

So in practice, no, it's not very useful. Most students are still forced to use a web browser and nothing more, else they run the risk of getting in trouble for hacking their Chromebook.

Tangent: That being said, it's hilarious how much worse the schools are at locking down Windows computers. As far as I can tell, they just bought a few commercial solutions, set them up on the Chromebooks, and paid no attention to the Windows computers. The BIOS isn't even locked. They're only restricted at the network level.

My middle school's computers (desktop pcs with windows at the time) fidn't have passwords on the bios We would bring linux "live users to boot on and play minecraft

A loss for the school, but definitely a win for our education

People aren't forced, they choose it. They are clueless about technology and don't trust anything that may look like a dark horse. They want reassurance. It's not just the "enterprise" or corporate world. Home users have that mentality. Mac computers cost an arm and a leg and people still pay for it because the advertising machine has hammered it into the heads that "it just works." Most people only trust big brands. The bigger the better.

> People aren't forced, they choose it.

I'm forced to use it at work. :(

I share that sentiment.

One important reality, though, is that "forced" is a sticky word here. Anyone sufficiently anti-FAANG and tech-savvy enough will find a workaround, so the constraints are far less than most dominant forces across the lens of history.

If a school requires Windows, students are forced to use it. Not changing schools isn't "choosing" Windows.

But yes, I'm always surprised how many people buy things introduced to them in ads.

> People aren't forced, they choose it.

No they don't. There aren't any schools nearby that do not force Windows on the students and I can have my whole house on Linux it doesn't matter: if you want to participate in highschool around here then Windows it is. My personal views of MS, their crimes past and present are worth absolutely nothing. I would not be surprised if you dig deep enough that you'll find some level of corruption but even that doesn't help me, it would just lead to a long and drawn out court case the outcome of which will likely be resolved long after my kids are out of school.

So, I have no choice other than to take my kids out of school and that too - rightly so - isn't an option.

It's more than a little bit ridiculous too because there isn't anything in the highschool curriculum that per-se would require access to a windows computer. But they make it so that it just simply doesn't work otherwise, starting from windows native applications for the agenda and messaging system and ending with sending documents in proprietary formats.

Well clearly the choice is to move to an area where your kids are able to run Linux.

I hope that was sarcastic. FWIW I think that government institutions, educational institutions, banks, insurance companies, health care service providers etc should use only open standards. No proprietary stuff at all. So no banking apps, no voting apps, calendar apps, no healthcare claim apps and definitely no client side software (Mac or Windows). Just the web and properly managed infrastructure.