Comment on Why is Windows still bloated
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 21 hours ago
Enterprise customers depend on legacy stuff that you haven’t heard of. And there’s enough of these 800-pound gorillas in the room that pay for enough of Microsoft’s bills that they have to listen to, that they can’t cut it. A behaviour bug from 2002 is actually used by, say, JP Morgan’s trading department as a critical part of their flow.
Also, the legacy stuff is literally decades of work and knowledge so unscrambling it is not really feasible.
They can’t nuke it because of the customers that rely on it. Microsoft’s job (and that of all vendors) is to cost less than a migration to another option.
Quicky@piefed.social 21 hours ago
Yeah I understand those legacy systems, but I wouldn’t expect those to be upgrading to Windows 11 for example. I guess that’s why I was suggesting a separation of “then” and “now” operating systems.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 20 hours ago
The legacy systems need to upgrade because they need security patches. It’s not an incompatible system from 1992. Windows broke stuff going to Vista, when real-time controllers like you’d find running a power plant or CNC changed in ways I don’t remember, but fundamentally you could run a 35 year old application on windows 11 with tweaks over the years. These companies are running apps written in the 70s and 80s.
Microsoft could and perhaps should bifurcate Windows into new and old, or draw a line along Server and Workstation, but I think the bulk of their windows income comes from these enterprises and the “new” windows wouldn’t sell that well - it’s effectively been free for consumers since 8. Windows was the absolute show runner for decades but since the Cloud, it’s shrank quite a lot so there isn’t the money there anymore.
ARM is an interesting experiment they’ve been working on from a couple angles over the years but never really got the buy in.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 20 hours ago
There’s no value in switching to ARM, basically.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 20 hours ago
ARM is absolutely serving Intel’s head on a platter these days and it’s slowly happening - Server 2025 is availableish in ARM, and the Copilot PCs are ARM. There’s value but MS would rather customers go to PaaS than rebuild eg MSSQL on ARM, I think.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 20 hours ago
Every desktop/laptop will upgrade to 11 - no business will accept the risk of maintaining an OS that’s out of support (with some exceptions). So you don’t have a choice.
Quicky@piefed.social 20 hours ago
Every desktop/laptop will not upgrade to 11. There’s a whole bunch of hardware requirements that prevent it from being installed on legacy systems.