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OS is really not making them money anymore. One thing that helped apple make a comeback was intel hosts and encouraging dualbooting and software to run your windows on mac.
Windows OS is one of the biggest misses in the company's history. The money lost on Zune pales in comparison to the missed opportunities of making NT the go-to dev platform.
People like Mac OS better. The most popular user OS in the world is Android. Cloud is Linux. Microsoft knows they have to play nice because they are so far behind there's no point in competing how they used to.
Man, I do miss my Zune though. That thing was ahead of its time in some ways
It's really fascinating to see this in my lifetime. I thought of Microsoft as this computing giant growing up, and now they're more of a cloud services company with an office product side business.
And then there's this weird desktop thing called Windows with some niche uses in gaming and enterprise, shipping by default on a platform that's increasingly not relevant to regular users.
Well, it's making them plenty of money, but they pretty much get that money no matter what (from the device manufacturers when they sell hardware, and from businesses afraid to have their software entitlement coupled to the accident of their hardware).
Now it's a game of using that guaranteed footprint to bolster the recurring revenue services (OneDrive, Office, Azure). They still get the money for however the copy got there, but also use the copy to launch folks into recurring revenue options.
Except that if the rumors are true, they plan to move to a subscription model for Windows. If they do that, then I'll be done with Windows completely, and rely on Lutris/Steam (Wine/Proton) for all my gaming needs. I run Windows for nothing else.