ThrowawayB7 (u/ThrowawayB7)

ThrowawayB7 commented on I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone idiallo.com/byte-size/can... · Posted by u/firefoxd

marcus_holmes · a day ago

Yeah but which 3%? It's important.

There are a lot of Steam gamers with 5 games in their library who log on once a month. There are a few Steam gamers with 5000 games in their library who are permanently logged in. There's folks who play one game obsessively, and folks who tinker around with many games.

I'm willing to bet that the 3% are the kind of people who buy a lot of games.

I'd love to see that "what percentage of games have been bought by people on which platform?" metric. I think it'd be a lot more than 3% on Linux, even if you count Steam Deck as a separate platform.

ThrowawayB7 · a day ago

I think you'd lose that bet. The kind of people who buy a lot of games are also the people who are not going to be tolerant of game compatibility issues on Linux; they want to play the game, not futz with their OS.

ThrowawayB7 commented on I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone idiallo.com/byte-size/can... · Posted by u/firefoxd

labrador · a day ago

I'm happy with Windows 11 after tweaks to fix it. I certainly sympathesize with Windows 10 users who can't upgrade. But it seems to me Windows 10 users aren't getting the message: Microsoft just isn't that into you.

Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases? I'm guessing not (I don't have the figures) and Microsoft would rather you replace your 10 year old laptop that can't run Windows 11 or run Linux on it. They really don't care which, just as long as you go away and they don't have to support you anymore.

I'm not assosciated with Microsoft, just someone who has been using their products for 40 years. I am someone who can read in between the lines, and this is my take.

ThrowawayB7 · a day ago

> "Do you think Windows OS is a profit center...?"

The consumer editions are not all there is to Windows. Nearly every seat of Windows 11 Enterprise used in corporations is a paid license and there are a lot of corporations. Nearly every instance of Windows Server is a very expensive paid license and is required to run Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL Server, etc.

ThrowawayB7 commented on Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse garbagecollected.dev/p/va... · Posted by u/ee64a4a

ZeroConcerns · 5 days ago

Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago, since that could have reduced the stranglehold of Steam on the gaming marketplace.

Turns out that the usual Microsoft incompetence-and-ADHD have kind-of eliminated that threat all by itself.

Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform.

Still: are consumers better off today than in the PS2 era? I sort-of doubt it, but, yeah, alternate universes and everything...

ThrowawayB7 · 5 days ago

> "Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform."

Valve is the one putting in the effort and paying for it at their own expense. If they ever lose interest in paying for it, like GabeN retiring and Ebenezer Scrooge replacing him, then it's game over for Linux gaming (literally).

ThrowawayB7 commented on Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse garbagecollected.dev/p/va... · Posted by u/ee64a4a

mschuster91 · 5 days ago

> One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to give up on Windows Phone.

They had no other choice.

The technical foundation of the prior WP versions (aka, Windows CE) was just too dated and they didn't have a Windows kernel / userland capable of performantly dealing on ARM, x86 performance was and still is utter dogshit on battery powered devices, they didn't have a Windows userland actually usable on anything touch based, and most importantly they did not have developer tooling even close to usable.

At the same time, Apple had a stranglehold over the upper price class devices, Android ate up the low and mid range class - and unlike the old Ballmer "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" days, Microsoft didn't have tooling that enticed developers, while Apple had Xcode with emulators that people had been used to for years, and Android had a fully functioning Eclipse based toolchain.

ThrowawayB7 · 5 days ago

As I recall, that is not correct. There was a gargantuan internal effort to refactor Windows 10 to run on everything from mobile devices to servers. Windows Phone 10 was running Windows 10. And the tile UI was well received by those who had WP devices.

As others have said, lack of critical apps and shenanigans from Google is what killed sales which led to the death of Windows Phone.

ThrowawayB7 commented on Users brutually reject Microsoft's "Copilot for work" in Edge and Windows 11 windowslatest.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/robtherobber

Nextgrid · 23 days ago

> the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want.

The correct Windows edition is LTSC or IoT or whatever BS name they've since come up with. It's a license that can only be obtained from a reseller (since putting up a form that takes credit card details and spits out product keys is too complex for MS) and has a minimum order quantity (I believe you can pad the order with cheap "client access licenses" to get around that).

ThrowawayB7 · 14 days ago

You're proving my point for me: It's called Windows Enterprise and has been Windows Enterprise since the launch of Windows 10 a decade ago.

ThrowawayB7 commented on Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products windowscentral.com/artifi... · Posted by u/mohi-kalantari

adabyron · 14 days ago

When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated well with each other?

I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain.

Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when even slightly pushed.

* Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.

ThrowawayB7 · 14 days ago

I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.

There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.

ThrowawayB7 commented on Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products windowscentral.com/artifi... · Posted by u/mohi-kalantari

sylens · 15 days ago

I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.

Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.

The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.

ThrowawayB7 · 14 days ago

We've been hearing empty punditry like that for the last several decades all while they've been a poster child for "number go up": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...

These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSFT and then maybe there's something to discuss.

ThrowawayB7 commented on Users brutually reject Microsoft's "Copilot for work" in Edge and Windows 11 windowslatest.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/robtherobber

browningstreet · 24 days ago

My big company is all in on Copilot. So far it’s actually been a net plus. I like it and it makes my life easier. That said, when offered a PC or Mac I chose the Mac, because Recall. And all the Microsoft shenanigans on my home PC made me switch to Linux permanently.

If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better. They’re biffing that hard.

ThrowawayB7 · 24 days ago

> "If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better."

People here on HN are willing pay Google (monthly even!) to remove ads from YouTube. People here are willing to pay for RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu Pro Desktop for enterprise deployments. Yet people here are unwilling to pay Microsoft for the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want. Their problems are self-inflicted.

ThrowawayB7 commented on Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year' 9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/ti... · Posted by u/achow

paxys · a month ago

No company is immune to disruption, but plenty of them have innovation and adaptation in their DNA. IMO over the years Apple has lost that. Look at Google, or Meta, or even Microsoft. Diversified income streams. Clutch acquisitions. Massive capital investments. Data centers. Nuclear power plants. Moonshot factories. Self driving cars. AR glasses. Robots. Venture investing and dealmaking. Massive AI ambitions. Stuff they try might not always work, and sometimes fail spectacularly, but they still do it. Apple meanwhile has been perfectly content depending on a single product and the monopolistic hold on the ecosystem of that product for basically 100% of its revenue for the past two decades.

ThrowawayB7 · a month ago

> Look at Google or Meta...

Yeah, look at them: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/big-tech-companies-billions... Diverse they aren't. Alphabet is broken down in to segments but several segments including the largest one all boil down to online advertising revenue.

And Microsoft was already well diversified back in 2000.

ThrowawayB7 commented on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change neowin.net/news/microsoft... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

stalfosknight · a month ago

WTF is wrong with Microsoft? No one is asking for this.

ThrowawayB7 · a month ago

My answers is that Satya Nadella is betting the farm on LLMs/AI and, even if it's a path toward failure, Nadella has built enough credibility from past results that he will allowed to go a long way before the board or investors will start trying to rein him in. This could be Nadella's "let's buy Yahoo" moment.