Sony believed that they had so much market share that they could make a console that was leaps and bounds more complicated to code for, which would lock devs in and prevent them from going elsewhere, and they’d just have to suck it up because of said market share. Sony was wrong, and they lost out big time that generation (although they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars).
Microsoft seems to believe they have so much market share that they can force people to upgrade to a privacy invading, ai infested piece of crap, and that everyone needs to suck it up because market share.
I’ve already started hearing wind that people, in statistically significant numbers, are finding alternatives… so is this the same situation as the ps3?
Just a passing musing without much to back up the gut feelings.
Every once in a while, Microsoft makes fundamental mistakes which they only survive because of their size. Think Microsoft Bob or Windows 8. Looks like Windows 11 is heading in the same direction.
When recently onboarding for a new job I heard something I never thought I would hear in my life.
Everyone was given a Mac. Eng, design, finance, HR. Everyone. In my onboarding cohort, someone in finance asked if they could have a Windows PC, which has been the backbone of finance orgs for decades. IT said no. They just didn’t want to deal with Microsoft’s enterprise ecosystem.
I got the same treatment recently. All tech departments were issued M4 Mac Book Pros because that was more cost effective than than dealing with the non-compliant fuckery of W11. Unfortunately non-tech departments got the old inventory and are suffering the abhorrent instability of W11. It somehow refuses to play nice with just about everything in our corporate ecosystem.
But macOS is even more locked down than windows?
They specifically mentioned the enterprise ecosystem.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple’s MDM system is less painful to use for smaller businesses than Microsoft’s AD and everything attached to it. Hell it might even be nicer for big orgs, but I’ve never heard of one (apart from the likes of Google) not using AD
Also if you’re already dealing with one of those systems, an IT department is probably motivated to not run both and set up interop if they can avoid it
Used to work for Apple in B2B sales.
Granted, this was five years ago, but back then it was sort of the other way round. The deployment at SMB scale worked really well and was also free of charge.
AT enterprise you would need a third-party solution typically, something like JAMF.
Locked down would probably be a plus for enterprise.
But honestly I’ve never got that argument. In what way is macOS more locked down than Windows? In the hardware that it will run on yes. But for the average user it seems fairly similar on the being “locked down” front.
That’s nice to see actually. Regular consumers like us don’t have any pull, but businesses do. So I hope more start seeing Microsoft problematic enough to start shifting away to MacOS to get Microsoft to reassess their decisions.
Microsoft is bleeding power users and PC enthusiasts at an unprecedented rate. This is a great thing for Linux, but they are still absolutely locked into the corporate world and that’s where the money is.
The reality is that Microsoft solved management of corporate policy and identity like 25 years ago and nothing else has come close. It has its problems, but Active Directory is an incredible piece of software. The combination of LDAP, with obfuscation of Kerberos to the point where you don’t even need to know it exists, combined with policy deployment to endpoints is nothing short of a miracle.
Linux has tools for all those things, but none are easy to deploy or configure. If you have to manage thousands of desktops, Windows is still the clear choice
Novell solved directory services 25 years ago. It took MS 10 to catch up.
I was going to reply essentially the same thing! I’m glad someone remembers their IT history. :)
Well remember netware had a 250 user limit per server before 4.0. Thats not alot in corp space. I remember running many servers just to handle user auth and logon back with netware 3.12
Wasn’t 4 still a flat directory? I’m talking about 5 when it got serious.
If you are a large corporation or government, you’d have the resources to do exactly that. I keep hearing about European governments moving to Linux. And why wouldn’t you? Screw perpetual licensing.
What those EU governments are doing is out of interest for national security rather than hate for licensing. The US has changed drastically in the last decade and getting your sensitive data out of their infrastructure is a top priority.
The cost of change from Windows to Linux is pretty small for an individual. Most people have one or two machines and a handful of programs, none of which are critical to your continued existence.
In the corporate world, you need to be absolutely sure that everything will work flawlessly, which often means weeks or months of testing on top of all your regular IT duties, constant support tickets to obscure software vendors who may not have ever worked with Linux, and if some mission-critical piece of software breaks, then the company cannot operate until it is fixed…or you can continue to use Windows, even though it sucks more now.
I want Linux to have wider adoption in the desktop space, but it’s a catch 22. People aren’t going to move unless the software is guaranteed to work, and Linux-based software isn’t going to be made unless people are using it. This is why Proton was such a big deal. It offered a real option for gaming to move to the platform and now it’s viable and devs are starting to take linux into account.
Its not a guarantee of flawless operation thats required, its a source of liability if something goes wrong. Someone has to be responsible if the latest update blows everything up.
Now where did I place that consultant…
You keep hearing about the same 3 german states moving to LibreOffice. That’s not quite the same thing.
I present to you a wild notion:
Adobe OS.
They have the market value and revenue to do what steam is doing.
They could make switching a cost save if the OS integrates vertically with the creative cloud.
To be clear, I don’t want this and would t use it. But any business with licenses would say “wait… Ditch Microsoft ios, and… Poof? Everything works and we pay way less money?”
All that Microsoft provides any business at this point is AD/Azure.
I feel like Microsoft is taking massive Ls between now and 2030. I don’t think Adobe is gonna do this, I’m just saying if they did, it could work. Microsoft is a weak giant right now.
Linux is a bad choice for multiple reasons. I wish Linux had better support for games, DAWS (my job) and other software.
Linux has close to the best support for games possible without support from the game developers.
Other windows software usually isn’t quite as good in my experience, but still better than non-native software on any other operating system.
Never used a DAW, so I can’t say anything about that.
I wish Linux had better support for games, DAWS (my job) and other software.
Do you have any examples or details so we can understand your point better?
It runs FL studio and Ableton like complete ass as well as any plugin I need. Has terrible Nvidia support and even worse Intel support.
Lets not forget too that Sony ever only started making video games at all because Nintendo thought they had such strong market share that they could bully Phillips AND Sony. Phillips ended up being a little bitch, and didn’t do anything noteworthy. But Sony? Sony bent Nintendo over a barrel, and took their lunch money.
And then waited 10 years to make the same exact mistake.
The CD-I was at least like footnoteworthy.
Switched my home PC to Linux (Manjaro) over a year ago and had little issue getting it to run what I want. Steam works great these days. Wine has come a long way but I don’t end up using it… though might try to run Foobar now that I think of it.
I hear the fleet management argument though. I got a MacBook at work because I couldn’t stand windows 11 and it’s claim on all virtualization (have to disable security features to get VMs access to hardware virtualization), and I don’t envy our IT department having to deal with Jamf.
- Sony won that generation.
- The games are still being made for Windows. The time it takes to lose that whole platform would allow them plenty of time to correct their path.
- Microsoft are crooked AF… They’ve been keeping their monopoly status for over 30 years. They won’t let that change.
Sony objectively did not win that generation. The Nintendo wii did— some gamers don’t want to include the Wii in the running at all, but it was there and it won approximately 101 million to maybe 88 million.
Now, the ps3 made a remarkable comeback and eventually caught back up with the Xbox 360, tying or slightly exceeding it in sales in the very end, but that’s not winning. That’s especially not winning compared to the PS2 generation, where there was absolutely no contest that it won— there wasn’t even a serious rival to the ps2 at the time. It dominated. The ps3 barely squeaking out a second place trophy against a CLOSE third place, when it trailed far behind at first, is not winning the generation. It’s just not.
Sony lost the absolute monolithic dominance they had in the ps2 era. That’s the situation I’m comparing now. Maybe this windows 11 situation won’t echo the past, but it’s a question I’m musing on in the shower.
Sony wasn’t competing with Nintendo, they were competing with Microsoft.
lol no. That’s … simply not how markets work.
While I run Linux on a desktop, I’ve always owned a Windows laptop. I decided last week that instead of ever running Windows 11, I’m going to buy a Macbook and dual boot it with Linux. Yes I know I can run Linux on any number of PC hardware laptops, there are occasionally windows only utilities needed to run firmware or some other proprieatry application. If I can know I can always fall back to OSX for system updates and running proprietary commercial software, I’ll know I never need to touch Windows 11.
May when Microsoft realizes Windows 11 is Vista 2.0, Windows 12 may be great. With Linux and OSX, I don’t see myself coming back to Windows even then though.
Don’t you have problems with ARM not being able to run x86_64 software?
Yeah, it seems like kind of a headache to try to get Linux distros that work properly on Macs from what I’ve searched at least. Asahi Linux seems like the only one that works reliably compared to all the options available to Ryzen and Intel CPUs.
When it comes to Mac since they’ve moved to their own chips it’s seemed like its better to get a Mac to use MacOS, and Linux is more a fall back option in the future when it loses support with how it can be buggy.
Didn’t Valve just fix this with Fex?
Valve didn’t make Fex, and while it’s a compatibility layer, that doesn’t mean it runs everything.
Just look at Proton and you can see after years (and focusing exclusively on games) it’s still not near 100%.
I’d be curious to hear how you end up liking it.
As someone who spends a lot of time on the command-line, I’ve generally preferred MacOS over Windows as my not-Linux OS. But my impression is that for people who like the Windows or Linux GUI, MacOS is a bigger (and less pleasant) change.
And even on the command-line, MacOS is a different *nix distro and makes seme pretty weird choices (launchd, plists, /etc is actually /private/etc, …) whereas you could have vanilla Ubuntu inside WSL2.
one can hope, but I think it’s a long shot. Most of my normie friends aren’t going to switch even if microsoft assigned a live person to sit next to them and monitor their usage. “it needs to just work, and i know how to use it” they say (or something along those lines).
Its because its used in schools, they learn it, they become reliant on it, its in their workplaces, at their home.
Its why Microsoft dont really care if you pirate Windows, the more people using it, the more reliant they are on it, then they cash in big time at the enterprise level. Same with Photoshop etc etc.
If we taught how to use Linux instead…
Yeah exactly! We need to ask Linux in schools! I even tried to convince the headmaster of a school by telling them how they would save money with linux sice they don’t have to pay licenses and hardware last longer, all the software they use is linux compatible (they even use LibreOffice instead of MS office!) I don’t go to that school anymore so i don’t know if they did it but i doubt
Sony also made a similar mistake when they phased out the PSP, only to later revive it as PSVITA.
