governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines.
20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" today.
It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away.
To put it another way, the thresholds where people get annoyed enough to quit are highly correlated to each other. If individuals on HN are posting "I don't want to switch, I've been working this way for decades now, but Windows has crossed the line for me, I've switched to Linux, and it was easier than I thought it would be", then corporations and governments are having very similar deliberations internally.
This is probably a more accurate model for how "influencers" seem to work than the idea that some crazy guy in your organization falls in love with Product X and evangelizes it internally. I'm sure that happens and is a real force, but this correlation-of-experience effect is probably bigger on the whole. If Product X was good enough to make an evangelist internally, or more germane to this conversation, to make some a mortal enemy of it internally, it's usually because it was a good enough or bad enough product to be able to do that in the first place, and eventually everyone will figure it out in exactly the same way, just later.
20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. If Microsoft responds correctly that might be good, but if they just decide to rest on their laurels and extract whatever value they can out of Windows while they can, Windows would never last 20 years of that. Even the slowest organizations can move faster than that. After all, to cut Microsoft's revenues off at the knees, they don't need to remove every last Windows 2000 server in their backoffice they can't upgrade, they need to cut out just the majority of desktop licenses.
Not sure about big enterprises, but I already see this happening in the mid-size, non tech company market.
I'm an IT manager and has been a sysadmin/ops for my entire career, and the past ~4 years I've been seeing a pretty consistent shift toward companies my company does business with deploying more and more macs. Windows is still dominant in my industry, but the cracks in the wall are widening. It's gotten to the point that I'm genuinely surprised now when I see Windows when someone screen shares.
Apple silicon is just too good and the generations coming into the workforce now don't have a "default" windows familiarity that we used to have. They're coming in needing to be trained on how to use a PC in general, windows or not, having used nothing but chromebooks and mobile OSes.
Now, Office OTOH is more entrenched than windows. Even the macshops I interact with are all on M365. Macs are managed with Intune, users & SSO with Entra, Defender for EDR, and of course the office apps. And that's why Microsoft probably isn't as afraid as it seems when it comes to Windows. Even without Windows lock-in, there is very real M365 lockin that is far more entrenched than the endpoint OS.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.)
It won't be sudden, until it is
it is great that some are starting, seriously. but windows is not in significant danger as of today.
this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government).
point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.
And Canadian banks aren't known for moving fast. They are pretty conservative (at least the big chartered banks are).
user management, file management, security, windows-specific software, auditing requirements, required capital investment, lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on.
i would love to see your numbers for this. what does "increasing percentage" mean? 1% -> 2%? 10% -> 20%?
i teach at a college level, in tech, and would estimate ~5% of incoming students have any experience with something other than windows on a pc, at best. outside of tech, i would estimate ~2%.
It happened with all the vpn+shared drives buried to just use SPO.
different experience,I guess.
Did your employees got trained? or just sent the link to 3 'online trainings'?
Managers manage to switch to Mac seamlessly. I am sure the rest will follow with cheaper macs now available. And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)
office is a tiny, almost negligible, piece of the puzzle. quickbooks, solidworks and other cad software, bespoke software, security software, user management, permissions management (replacing active directory), contractual obligations, the millions of dollars required in implementation, the millions more dollars required for increased user support, and so on...
but, again, just to reiterate: i am disputing that windows is in "significant danger" today.
The switch to Linux is happening this year. Until the end of the year they want all workers on Linux instead of Windows.
It is possible, and fast if you want it.
Haven't they been doing this every 5 - 8 years since 2004?
out of curiosity, "large parts" of "one german state" is how many machines roughly?
i am suspecting that it is probably nowhere near enough to put windows in "significant danger". however, i am rooting for their success and hope that they thoroughly document (and publish) the process. i have never seen a transition like that go smoothly, let alone when it is in government.
That was the situation at the end of December.
Note that projects like these often fail not for technical reasons, not even cost, but political pressure from other parties, pressure from people that worked for ages in the administration and, well, have some problems to adjust to new software.
There is also a push from the German state to switch to open source or at least European solutions. There is the Deutschland-Stack, for which the IT planning council made open source mandatory: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Deutschland-Stack-IT-Planning-C...
And so on. At my day job more and more customers are reconsidering cloud adoption, especially M365 and such.
and the "80%" seems slightly misleading, because it is 80%, not including the tax administration. i have no idea what overall % of machines are inside or outside of the tax administration.
it also appears like this is mostly about software like office, rather than operating systems?
>"outside the tax administration, almost 80 percent of workplaces in the state administration have already been switched to the open-source office software LibreOffice."
switching away from office is significantly more realistic than migrating away from windows altogether, and something that every business can and should absolutely consider doing soon.
anyways, seriously, good for them. as i mentioned elsewhere, i hope that they are thoroughly documenting their experiences and are willing to share them after completion.
Iirc they have 30k workstations.
so, the quote i specifically replied to said that today windows is in "significant danger", and i said it isnt. we seem to be in agreement.
as for what the future holds, i think it will be much slower than other people. but maybe i am wrong! which would be fine with me.
but, today, windows is not in "significant danger".
I think Microsoft won, too.
I think theyre terrified of positive examples. Especially ones with FAR lower TCO and lower geopolitical risks.
If you have a PC at home right now, and you're not technically inclined, and Windows is driving you nuts, you're just not getting a new PC again. More and more people are managing without PCs at home, using their phone or a tablet.
To many of us, the idea of your phone as your primary computing device is complete bonkers, but more and more people are choosing that option. Microsoft isn't really giving them a reason to stay, because every time they fired up their laptop Windows updates starts rolling in, taking forever, the UI keeps bugging them about things they don't care about and now there's ads in the start menu. So will Windows attempts to boot, the average person already did the thing they needed to do on their phone.
Windows Home Edition, or whatever it's call now, isn't competing with Linux and Mac, it's competing with Android and iOS, and it's losing.
The options for the average user are not linux or windows, but only macOS or Windows. Gaming is abysmal on macOS on any of the current hardware.
That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android.
I don't think you are aware of how much the landscape has changed regarding gaming and Linux.
i dont think this is true. steam surveys also do not agree: linux gamers are about 2x the number of OSX
The options for an average user, who does not use steam and is not in the steam hw survey, are just macOS and windows.
The options for a serious gamer who uses steam (a tiny fraction of PC users) is clearly just Windows or SteamOS at this point, or more likely Windows + a steam deck (which is half of the 2% there, SteamOS).
Or just gaming on iOS / android, like most gamers do these days. The steam hw survey isn't really representative of gamers since the vast majority of them game on consoles and phones.