Microsoft Explains How It Keeps PC Makers Happy While Also Competing With Them (cnbc.com) 60
The partners that license Windows haven't always supported Microsoft's moves to step on their turf with its own tablets and laptops. So how is Microsoft navigating those relationships now? From a report: The CEO of Acer told the Financial Times Microsoft should "think twice" when it first introduced its Surface tablet in 2012. And Asus reportedly felt blindsided when Microsoft chief product officer Panos Panay unveiled the Surface Book -- which was more like a traditional laptop computer -- in 2015. When Panay speaks at Microsoft events about the latest Surface computers, he almost unnaturally enthusiastic and oddly specific about hardware components. Now, he said, he's excited -- he likes to use the word "pumped" -- about the diversity of options for consumers and organizations, no matter who builds the hardware.
"OEMs provide choice for customers," Panos said of Microsoft's partners. "Not just choice for choice's sake. What do you want to accomplish? You can pick a device that suits you." In 2016, Microsoft announced a partnership with Lenovo, the world's biggest seller of PCs, in an effort to prevent conflicts that might arise between the Surface business and Windows. "We came to a very simple approach...we call it a level playing field," said Lenovo's leader of worldwide strategic alliances, Christian Eigen, who has known Panay for 15 years. "It means Microsoft does not give, from an operating system point of view, any feature exclusively to Surface." The CEOs of Microsoft and Lenovo communicate four to six times per year, and teams lower down in the organizations talk 12 to 24 times per year, Eigen explained. Microsoft also improved its communications with partners around Windows 11. "It was definitely, by far, more transparent and open and kind of cooperative development," Eigen said. [...] "My whole goal is, 'Hey, what do your customers need?' This is from an OEM brand perspective," Panay said. "Same with Surface. 'What do the Surface customers need?' Ultimately, they're all Windows customers." He said has has had input on every Surface model, including the Surface Laptop Studio PC that went on sale this week.
"OEMs provide choice for customers," Panos said of Microsoft's partners. "Not just choice for choice's sake. What do you want to accomplish? You can pick a device that suits you." In 2016, Microsoft announced a partnership with Lenovo, the world's biggest seller of PCs, in an effort to prevent conflicts that might arise between the Surface business and Windows. "We came to a very simple approach...we call it a level playing field," said Lenovo's leader of worldwide strategic alliances, Christian Eigen, who has known Panay for 15 years. "It means Microsoft does not give, from an operating system point of view, any feature exclusively to Surface." The CEOs of Microsoft and Lenovo communicate four to six times per year, and teams lower down in the organizations talk 12 to 24 times per year, Eigen explained. Microsoft also improved its communications with partners around Windows 11. "It was definitely, by far, more transparent and open and kind of cooperative development," Eigen said. [...] "My whole goal is, 'Hey, what do your customers need?' This is from an OEM brand perspective," Panay said. "Same with Surface. 'What do the Surface customers need?' Ultimately, they're all Windows customers." He said has has had input on every Surface model, including the Surface Laptop Studio PC that went on sale this week.
Windows 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 11 keeps OEM's Happy.
Now they have the opportunity to sell more PC's since Microsoft effectively EOL'd any PC older than 2017 with Windows 11.
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or older than 2018 in some cases. My 2017 i5-7500 3.40GHz box with 32GB RAM failed the version of test they just put out. For some work stuff I run the win 10 partition of disk from a VM, hopefully I never need Win 11.
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If you actually need win11, there are scripts that disable the relevant checks on installation and let you install regardless.
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How does your favourite linux distro help someone who needs to install win11 on their old machine?
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How does your favourite linux distro help someone who needs to install win11 on their old machine?
The same way most things Linux-related are helpful; not at all.
Linux (and its adherents) are functional, useful, powerful, but not generally helpful.
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Spoken as someone who has never reached out on a community forum. Or did, but was a dick about it (as here).
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Well, there are those who WINE about such things, but it's a matter of thinking outside of the VirtualBox.
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Why would that be Linux or BSD distro's problem? Or VM makers? It's artificial problem Microsoft is creating. My ignorant Microsoft bitch employer makes me run that shit, no one should expect real operating system to support that shit.
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Problem isn't created by microsoft, but by natural law of scarcity. No one is going to invest capital into creating desktop linux versions of their software if potential user base is too tiny to recoup the costs.
Microsoft simply played off this natural law by ensuring initial scarcity when it cared about windows being the primary desktop OS. Today, it doesn't really care anymore, but the issue is going on pure inertia. And that's going to be really hard to break.
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How does your favourite linux distro help someone who needs to install win11 on their old machine?
It doesn't, but that's not the point. When I wiped my final Windows install in 1999, I started learning how to do computing without Windows-only software. Over time, I found Linux versions of everything I need. I went cold turkey, so I had to ramp up quickly. What I learned, though, was how to function without Windows. I haven't had to deal with Windows stupidity for over twenty years now.
It's a lot like recovering from alcoholism, or some other mental disorder, but without the constant craving to resume th
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The fact that you are comparing "OS being used" which for overwhelming majority of people is dictated by "software availability and employer requirements"... to addiction tells us nothing about software in question.
But it tells us a lot about your motivations.
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those are worthless outside of a testing playground. you can't install updates
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If you need win11 so much, you're not really going to care. You'll just install it for whatever specific thing you need, and then boot back to win10.
Not exactly hard to securely run a modern windows machine without updates if you're a competent power user either.
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That's only option for children to play with windows 11. Won't fly in corporate environment. The VPN won't connect you, the IDS won't allow you, the MFA won't work with unpatched or obsolete version, even the modern malware scanner will flag you, and management will find out and call you in as corporate policy won't allow you.
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I run my Linux of choice and use windows on partition via VM, asshole. It's patched, VPN connects me, IDS and malware scanner work, and management is fine with it.
So fuck off, little manlette, the adults are talking. Go play your steam game.
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No competent employer (nor their vpn, IDS, MFA and malware scanning systems) are going to allow unpatched Windows systems to connect. Mine won't. Not an option for corporate worker.
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You're creating a stupid scenario of a hypothetical employer that somehow won't provide the systems needed, but demand win11 on incompatible hardware which apparently will be user's own hardware. And then block that system from connecting to their systems anyway.
There are a few too many layers of "chance of this happening is exceedingly low" stacked on top of each other for the edge case you're arguing about to be of any relevance.
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Did it really though? Support is there for five more years.
It was more of a PR push than anything.
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It's not even clear Windows 11 will be a "keeper", it's certainly lined up to be the skip-gen OS like WIndows 8, Vista, Me. There's nothing really driving the upgrade, it's mostly just marketing nonsense.
Also, unless you were born yesterday, everyone knows you don't adopt a new Windows until at least the first year (was: service pack). They always suck on launch, unless you're paid to beta test, don't.
So MS explains how it thinks PC makers are happy.. (Score:2)
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They tried in the past. Due to old software lock ins for their clients, they couldn't.
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They tried in the past. Due to old software lock ins for their clients, they couldn't.
That's not the case these days though, so much is available as web applications which even includes MS Office (if you really need that). Previously a lot of coporate LOB applications were written for IE with ActiveX but that's been actively eliminated by Microsoft in favour of web standards so the holdouts are really getting pushed to more platform-agnostic solutions.
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Sadly, not true. While some of the more popular applications have been ported in one form or another to linux, most are still windows only.
This is why Steam's current work with their handheld are so critical. If they actually manage to get gaming to take off on linux, people might actually start running linux at home.
And from there, there will come demand for everyone working from home to have linux support for their workflow. And that's how you'll get all that work software ported. Hopefully.
But I really d
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Sadly, not true. While some of the more popular applications have been ported in one form or another to linux, most are still windows only.
I suppose you need to quantify that in the context of the customers of the major OEMs. What specific application are these businesses running that don't exist on Linux? Macs are deployed extensively (not nearly as much as Windows of course) in enterprise and they suffer the same application compatibility issues with Windows programs as Linux does.
There are a great many applications that aren't available on Linux but I would assume (perhaps incorrectly) that the overwhelming number of office workers would do
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>What specific application are these businesses running that don't exist on Linux?
First of all, plural. ApplicationS.
Second, literally almost every piece of custom software ever created for desktop users in industrial environment. Countless variants of CAD software for example. Those are the kind of software that will cost more to license for a single station that most people will earn in a year. And they're not going to be mission critical, designing things that cost far more than said license. Debuggin
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First of all, plural. ApplicationS.
Yes, apologies. I was not trying to be facetious, that was actually a typo.
Countless variants of CAD software for example. Those are the kind of software that will cost more to license for a single station that most people will earn in a year. And they're not going to be mission critical, designing things that cost far more than said license.
Yes, there are absolutely cases like this across industries, I'm thinking more of the average office worker, the kinds of people that were tied to Windows because of IE and ActiveX and MS Office. Though perhaps it's easier to just standardize on Windows in the absence of any compelling reason to move part of their workforce to Linux just because they can.
When you don't even understand the problem and think that this is about something relevant to OS itself, there's no way for you to even begin addressing the actual issues.
I agree for the most part, Linux doesn't provide the users any reason to switch
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It's still very much the case, just with more band-aid solutions enabled because of patchy web app support. Office in the browser is no more an Office replacement than Google Docs is, or StarOffice before it. Yes, you can use it for viewing documents and making some changes, but the experience is still utter rubbish compared to the native desktop applications. It's more geared at people who want to do collaborative editing via Sharepoint, which was even more of a disaster before.
All of the big apps (Microso
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All of the big apps (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, etc.) that businesses rely on are either Windows only or increasingly Windows/macOS. The situation hasn't drastically changed in the ~25 years I've been using Linux, and there is absolutely no reason to think that it ever will, primarily because there is zero demand for it, and zero motivation for businesses.
That's primarily because the Linux desktop (despite hundreds of distributions) offers nothing compelling or innovative to disrupt Windows' dominance so you end up with a chicken and egg situation as you describe.
If my business is paying the same licensing cost either way, why would I intentionally seek out a worse user experience over something as inconsequential as a Windows license?
Agreed. Even if it's cheaper is it really worth it? The $50 you might save on your OEM license when you buy your machines every, say 3 years, is nothing.
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Well, there's the discount to those exclusively retailing Windows, which means everyone else is at a significant disadvantage.
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Well, there's the discount to those exclusively retailing Windows, which means everyone else is at a significant disadvantage.
Is there? I guess companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, etc... don't get such discounts since they don't exclusively do Windows. So who is getting this "discount"?
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Microsoft's lips were moving? What more do you need to know?
Customers need... (Score:1)
An alternative to pre-installed proprietary OSes.
MS is offering the OEMs every carrot to stop them from going Linux, after decades of both carrots and sticks. MS dreams of becoming Apple, but clearly thinks the OEMs are necessary to maintain market position for Windows.
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Yeah, you found the one exception.
Try becoming a "Certified Microsoft Partner" and see what it entails. Also see, what it entails to not become one.
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An alternative to pre-installed proprietary OSes.
MS is offering the OEMs every carrot to stop them from going Linux, after decades of both carrots and sticks.
That has existed for a long time, Dell still offers it on some of their laptops, likewise with Lenovo and HP, that's before you go to exclusive Linux laptop makers like System76 and Purism. Of course the big OEMs don't offer it on all their laptops, it would be silly to go to all that effort and expense only to find out nobody wants them so they do it on a small number first to gauge interest. Even BestBuy was selling desktops with Linux pre-installed many years ago, they stopped because nobody bought them.
Yes, I didn't read TFS (Score:2)
It's MS. All I want to know is, can you turn the new shit off and if, how.
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> the diversity of options for consumers and organizations, no matter who builds the hardware.
Given that hardware is not their core compentency, I interprete this to mean they've lowered the bar again for themselves. But, you know, diversity!
Their software is nothing to get "pumped up" over either. Ah yes, where is that "diversity" they speak of?
Embrace (Score:1)
This is the embrace phase. It is actually the most transparent implementation of the embrace phase I've seen so far and is combined with dumping the hardware out in loss leader fashion. As their presence in the space grows they will talk about this 'level playing field' concept less. Or rather they'll k
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We got several of those here, sadly.
Like that guy that constantly posts the same comment failing to ridicule "Bad because M$". He may have gotten mod points.
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That is like saying bad because Nazi's or the IRS. The company has a history of "do only evil" except during the embrace phase of their historic embrace, extend, extinguish universal business strategy.
Some of their solutions aren't entirely shit from a technical perspective but that is generally only because they implement the things everyone else avoids because they are gaping monolithic exploitable security bad practices or they are ripped off.
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That is literally what the story is about.
"thus forcing OEMs to an alternative which would likely be Linux?"
I very much doubt they care what the scraps of any remaining OEMs are loading on the single digit share of th
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Of course they are trying to keep the relationships. They need their cooperation to reach the end game.
"So when exactly is Microsoft's Surface line of computers going to take over the PC market?"
I'm speaking to consistent historical behavior as applied to the new market conditions and product lines. Nothing about that is predicated on them ultimately succeeding in their aims, only having aims.
Surface tablets aren'
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we've seen this before (Score:1)
It's like getting the corporate version of a reach-around from King Kong. Which maybe better than not getting one, from certain viewpoints.
MS sells PCs?? (Score:2)
I thought their gadgets were just ... gadgets. So locked-down mobile-like systems.
Do they really not try to stop you from installing your own OS and software?
Do they really offer easy programming and automation of your tasks?
You know... the things that make a PC a PC.
Microsoft should copy Google (Score:2)
The chromebook development model of hardware platforms which OEMs can dress up in their own form factor with limited variation in things like display allows far better QA and updating. The laissez faire approach to PC composition has become a liability to Windows.
Then they just need a proper win32 sandbox which can sandbox individual applications and multiple applications together. Instead of trying to force everything into the overly restrictive windowsapps and at best just dumping all win32 applications i
Wag the Dog (Score:2)