That’s not really the point though. I’m not even talking about end users. Government agencies, corporate backend services, customer service agencies and more are all abandoning Windows for Linux partially because Win11 is a horrible product, but also because the requirements just keep growing which is stupid.
There response to this is the above, which they were STAUNCHLY opposed to previously because they need to try and force AI down users throats to justify the money they have pissed away on it. They’re shoehorning Copilot bullshit into every product line they have now, and it’s WILDLY unpopular and unnecessary. If this is the best they can do to address it, they’ll continue to hemorrhage users.
When more state agencies in the US start switching, they’ll release some “Windows Lite” bullshit, but it will too late because the commitments needed for these organizations to bother switching is massive. They’ll be losing licenses for an entire generation of Windows at the very least.
Damage@feddit.it 8 hours ago
I mean, they already lost the war to Linux on infrastructure, those are billions they never made. It’s not unlikely for them to lose the desktop as well.
kchr@lemmy.sdf.org 6 hours ago
Not really. Almost every Windows-based company over a certain number of employees will use some shape or form of Active Directory (whether on-prem or in Azure) and nost likely also Office 365, which is corporate/enterprise infrastrucure that is really hard to migrate away from once you built your company IT and processes around it.
All the license fees for just retaining access to and being able to onboard new employees in that infrastructure is a huge portion of the budget for these companies.
They just gave up the war on competing with UNIX/Linux on the non-enterprise production infrastructure side, since there were no money to be made there.
Damage@feddit.it 4 hours ago
Infrastructure meaning servers
kchr@lemmy.sdf.org 1 hour ago
I know what you mean, but it’s not what you said. :-)
Just wanted to point out that they still have monopoly on the enterprise side of organization infrastructure, which is huge - the number of companies running production systems on self-hosted Linux infrastructure are orders of magnitude fewer than those that don’t, even if the number of Windows servers in total might be fewer.
Microsoft gets paid per employee, per application suite and per cloud service (if Azure is involved for the AD) - not only per server. They were very early on the recurring subscription model almost every SaaS provider is leaning into nowadays, even for on-prem stuff.