I’m with you
Teams, modern O365, AD, Azure, etc only sells because its built on Windows.
I can assure you, I’m watching an org entrench themselves deeper into the MS eco to obtain these services. The reasoning is that the systems they have are useless and they believe MS will fix everything.
If MSFT loses the home market, businesses have a high chance of following, especially since their QA process relies exclusively on home users.
There is a 10-15 year delay on this as a user-base from school needs to be developed. This could happen if schools find they can run the software they need on older and older hardware.
All they really need is to reach maybe 10% desktop market share, and MSFT would start facing a slaughter in the coming years as big OEMs start shipping linux from factory.
OEMs were shipping Linux on AMD a bit more than a decade ago. I don’t recall seeing Linux in the wild like that, but I remember the Dell AMD machines ended with a 5.
jj4211@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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).