[dade_]

It’s Vista 2! I switched to Mac in 2008, and I just did it again a few days ago. Reality is that almost everything I do is Linux, but Office with its horrific file formats keep it around. Fortunately Visio is nearly dead, 3 to go.

[keyringlight]

With Vista it was coming from the failed Longhorn project that was supposed to be transformative to windows and longer fixing up winxp than they wanted, but at least vista ended up as plain old windows then win7 was a polished up release. For the direction MS have taken win11 I can't see them turning it around so quickly especially while they're still driving full speed in the direction they think is right.

Really the question is who are they selling windows to and what do they put in it to try and make it an attractive offering. "Selling" might as well be figurative or literal seeing as they've now completely trained retail customers that they don't have to buy an OS even when before piracy was overlooked, and they'd need to be a significantly better offering than linux which is $0 and only getting better at undermining the core offering of 'running windows applications'.

[thewebguyd]

> who are they selling windows to

Big companies that are still all-in on Microsoft, or basically all Microsoft 365 customers (which is 89% market share).

They already have, and will continue, to make Office features exclusive to Windows, leaving the macOS version of the desktop apps behind, especially as more and more functionality starts to get locked behind Copilot.

They were OS agnostic for a while before the AI craze, and now it seems they want to roll back some of that agnosticism and make sure that M365 shops remain Windows shops instead of M365+macOS shops.