Re: [PLUG] ESR: Last phase of the desktop wars

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 10:57:32PM -0400, JP Vossen via plug wrote:
> Walt, you'd know much more about that than I do, so I'll take your
> word for it.  I agree I can't see MS trying to force a re-write,
> that's part of their stability problem, the inability to get away
> from decades of hardware, drivers and code.  That's a double-edged
> sword with the massive code-base & technical debt on one side and
> vast backwards compatibility on the other.
> 
> But I also don't see that that's what ESR is saying or what they are
> doing.  See TFA's the "old-Windows emulation" part...  And THAT
> makes me think WINE, except official and from the inside out instead
> of the outside in.

Frankly his whole post sounds like wishful thinking to me. I don't see
how "their services business is expanding" leads to "their OS business
will no long be profitable".

Microsoft is certainly expanding the platforms their application
software runs on. They've got very nice ports of their Office apps for
iOS. There are versions of them that run in web browsers, and I think
the web version of Outlook is by far the best Outlook. They've got a
version of Teams that runs on Linux as an Electron app. I see them
doing more of that. I do NOT, however, see them forsaking their entire
OS for Linux in the foreseeable future.

> Also, if you think of Windows as just another GUI and Desktop
> environment like Gnome or KDE or whatever else, it does
> get...interesting.  (Yeah, yeah, very different OS syscalls, etc..)

Exactly. Thinking of Windows that way doesn't make it that way! The
entire underlying OS is completely different.

Walt

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