I think you'd lose that bet. The kind of people who buy a lot of games are also the people who are not going to be tolerant of game compatibility issues on Linux; they want to play the game, not futz with their OS.
2 years ago I would have agreed with you, but the game compatibility issues really aren't there any more. Proton has made huge strides, and the Steam Deck has forced a lot of game companies to make sure that there aren't any issues.
> "Do you think Windows OS is a profit center...?"
The consumer editions are not all there is to Windows. Nearly every seat of Windows 11 Enterprise used in corporations is a paid license and there are a lot of corporations. Nearly every instance of Windows Server is a very expensive paid license and is required to run Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL Server, etc.
I have no experience with Windows Server or Enterprise and don't know anyone who does. Forgive me for omitting "consumer" from my description. Yes, I mean consumer Windows.
> "Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform."
Valve is the one putting in the effort and paying for it at their own expense. If they ever lose interest in paying for it, like GabeN retiring and Ebenezer Scrooge replacing him, then it's game over for Linux gaming (literally).
valve would recoup the cost from a bigger customer base, as well as paying it as insurance against windows/microsoft targeting them as an existential threat.
It's cheap for what they're getting. And iirc, it being open source means the foundation could be built upon by others if they do decide to call it quits.
That would make very little sense business wise. Steam “consoles” are not big break just for linux but also for valve.
What could easily happen though is locking down their consoles once they get profitable.
"Sense business wise" seems to vary quite a bit nowadays, at least every other day there's a headline of a company on here doing something almost exclusively for short-term value at the detriment to long-term health.
As I recall, that is not correct. There was a gargantuan internal effort to refactor Windows 10 to run on everything from mobile devices to servers. Windows Phone 10 was running Windows 10. And the tile UI was well received by those who had WP devices.
As others have said, lack of critical apps and shenanigans from Google is what killed sales which led to the death of Windows Phone.
I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.
There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.
These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSFT and then maybe there's something to discuss.
By that time, it will already be too late. I'd argue it's probably already too late... dead man walking kind of situation. Definitely true for consumers, it might survive out of inertia in the corporate environment for decades.
> "If Windows at home ran like Windows does on corporate PCs, people would like it better."
People here on HN are willing pay Google (monthly even!) to remove ads from YouTube. People here are willing to pay for RHEL Workstation or Ubuntu Pro Desktop for enterprise deployments. Yet people here are unwilling to pay Microsoft for the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want. Their problems are self-inflicted.
> the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want.
The correct Windows edition is LTSC or IoT or whatever BS name they've since come up with. It's a license that can only be obtained from a reseller (since putting up a form that takes credit card details and spits out product keys is too complex for MS) and has a minimum order quantity (I believe you can pad the order with cheap "client access licenses" to get around that).
I ran the version that shipped with my Dell. It was paid for. And mostly I want the ability to turn things off that retail Windows won't let you turn off.
People use the OS that came preinstalled on the machine. Not even Windows took off until Microsoft started armtwisting OEMs to preinstall it (Windows 3.0, 1990). And coming soon from Microsoft: locked bootloaders that prevent you from installing another OS! You know, because security, and no one installs alternative operating systems anyway.
Locked bootloader was making sense when PC was a huge investment, and the whole household was sharing it. Windows XP introduced fast account switching. And Windows still has it, but do you remember when was the last time you left your session active locked out and allowed someone else to log in to the same PC? Is there any other user at all on your current home PC? PC was standing for personal computer long before it was, but then it became. We don't share PC anymore in average.
Not only we don't share PC anymore, but PCs started to share us. We possess several PCs per single person, and we needed Dropbox to manage files on multiple PCs. Dropbox can be perceived as second turning point in time, and it was more than decade ago. Now it's one goal = one device era. We buy device and we sincerely don't intend to install anything else on it. We don't risk our data using NTFS shrinking tools to make spare room for another filesystem. We don't dual boot losing access to programs in another partition. There are ways to mount NTFS in other OS and vice versa, so documents may stay accessible, but programs are not runnable. This is now ridiculous. We just buy two, three, whatever devices and have all programs runnable simultaneously.
If we need something from another OS, we'll precisely buy compatible hardware without locked bootloaders or any other possible obstacle which are numerous. To name a few.
For DOS retrogaming we need DOS ISA DMA sound, and we pick PC with ISA slot and making sure motherboard chipset has DMA on ISA, which is not true on latest chipsets. For another DOS retrogaming option we consider VDMSound, but last OS to support it was Windows XP, and we choose hardware that is Windows XP compatible. Most likely UEFI-only boot will be a problem for Windows XP. For Mavericks Forever we are not going to look for random incompatible Mac. That is going to be either real compatible Mac selected from known list, or else compatible Hackintosh. On Hackintosh there was a big problem with software upgrade, but there will be no upgrades for Mavericks Forever. Tim Cook drives company away in direction we don't appreciate, and Mavericks Forever stays forever the same version.
Nowadays people are not using OS anyway. Nowadays people are using browser. I wish I could drag and drop documents in Mavericks Forever like I did in 2007. But document is now likely to be draw io, rectangular embedding for browser that cannot support drag and drop outside its rectange. And so messenger is also rectangular embedding for browser, not respecting Mac OS X multi-window paradigm, not supporting previously established gestures. In 2007 I thought that Qt programs on Mac were ugly. Those happy days I have not seen Electron yet.
People I know often report that they got rid from "dust collector", the PC. They are now all-Android. As time goes by, it is harder and harder to find someone with PC. So whatever Microsoft preinstalls or bootlocks on PCs, it goes to people less and less.
My answers is that Satya Nadella is betting the farm on LLMs/AI and, even if it's a path toward failure, Nadella has built enough credibility from past results that he will allowed to go a long way before the board or investors will start trying to rein him in. This could be Nadella's "let's buy Yahoo" moment.
> "All of this insulates them from having to worry about the long-term sustainability of making money from game sales on Windows..."
The weak link in your theory is that Microsoft is in control of the future of the DirectX API, not Valve, and it is Microsoft who is working with nVidia and AMD and game studios to evolve DirectX to take advantage of the latest GPU features. SteamOS can at best follow closely behind but can never take the lead without Valve developing their own games API that games developers an GPU makers are willing to target.
Did you forget about Vulkan? Valve and AMD are Khronos members and active contributors to the Vulkan spec. Games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Civ VII use Vulkan on Deck. There's a complete graphics ecosystem with full participation from the games industry that doesn't have Microsoft as the gatekeeper.
it would be a really bold move on microsoft's part, as it would be direct monopoly abuse
it would be interesting to see how or if they were punished for it in the current political environment or even the next one, but i hope we don't find out
i suspect long term it would just be a foot gun that drives vulkan's popularity anyway though
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