the last functional windows.

monkey’s paw curls a finger

Well yes because customers will be sunsetting support for Microsoft products with the end of Windows 10 :P

I feel like most people at Microsoft must know it and don’t care, the upper execs are either out to lunch or they are pre-emptively throwing away away the consumer desktop market because they just don’t value it anymore for whatever reason.

I think for the richest and farthest looking powerful people at Microsoft, the desktop battle is over, desktop OS software has become commodified (even though… it hasn’t actually yet by the numbers just by the practicality of the alternatives) and it isn’t worth investing seriously in maintaining their operating system long term as anything but a skin for their particular corporate flavor of Linux.

Internet Explorer to Edge but repeated with Windows.

Good riddance I say, but the complete divestment from giving a shit is pretty shocking, I don’t know where they think the on-ramp for customers is going to come from that will bring people fed up with Windows 11 onto friendly Linux distro where they can still use Microsoft software and services. I think it is more likely the bulk of people will just stop using desktop operating systems and…. Microsoft lost the battle to have relevance on mobile years and years ago?

It is weird because it feels like if Kodak saw the digital photography revolution coming 5-10 years before it happened and pre-emptively gave up on the entire film photography market and started releasing crap film and film related products and invested all their money into R&D for digital cameras… except that because Kodak was by far the biggest player in the film market before Kodak could develop a decent digital camera (if they were ever going to do that) the personnel photography market collapsed, fed up customers left, and there wasn’t a market for Kodak to sell personnel cameras of any type by the time they finally got their shit together to make a good one.

Digital photography in this metaphor is a consumer computer market where most people run a Linux based FOSS operating system with proprietary Microsoft services bolted on top and thus Microsoft finally can truly tell its customers to fuck off when they demand their operating not be trash (not that linux is trash). Certainly many many people are going this route, the year of the Linux desktop is no longer a joke these days and I am hyped, but it will be nowhere near enough for a company the size of Microsoft.