Windows hit its lowest market share in decades, Microsoft lost $400 billion in a week, and now their own president is admitting they need to fix the OS. SteamOS and Linux aren’t waiting around.
Windows hit its lowest market share in decades, Microsoft lost $400 billion in a week, and now their own president is admitting they need to fix the OS. SteamOS and Linux aren’t waiting around.
I think O365 is a bigger lockin than anything else. But you are right that AD/Entra, for example, is pretty much only because they also have the desktop market locked up. To the extent anyone bothers with Windows Server, which is almost no one anyway, it’s only because the desktop market, so that slice is at risk.
So you have Excel/Powerpoint as the biggest lockins for them outside of Windows itself, but Azure is broadly considered an acceptable choice alongside AWS or GCE, and your cloud provider selection tends to be pretty vendor locked pretty much instantly.
Of course, the bigger threat to them on the “desktop” is not so much RedHat/Ubuntu/SUSE as much as it is Android/iOS.
Not about Windows 11, but another discussion where laptops are infeasibly expensive this year drove some people to report that their companies have begun moving technicians they formerly required to use a laptop to tablets and phones. Having a tablet-in-a-laptop form factor with Aluminium flavor of Android may be an attractive option between hardware costs and Windows 11 nonsense piling on top of long-term Windows desktop nonsense (companies pay microsoft and several security companies to try to wallpaper over security, and Android/iOS are very appealing for their more restrictive privilege model).