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0 pointscess1111mo ago0 comments

Now, I get why you made the quip, but I for one keep both of those out of the business I run for this exact reason: I do not trust MICROS~1 in the medium to long term.

I also present the CEO and board with other arguments, like moral ones about involvement in atrocities and tyranny, legal ones regarding things like data protection, market related ones such as the likelihood of a future showdown between the EU and US.

But the risk that MICROS~1 fucks us over directly is even easier for them to understand, because they have been using Windows and Office for decades and are quite queasy about 10 going EOL and what the next set of annoyances in document management will be that they'll have to suffer under. It's something they have immediate experience of and didn't like.

A year from now it's probable we'll only have a couple of Windows machines left, because some of our customers use software that doesn't run under Wine and tries to block execution under both debuggers and container environments.

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dmz7311mo ago

I don't like to be seen as defending Microsoft, they definitely have their share of faults, but as far as business goes, I think Microsoft is the least likely company to screw you over as a (business) customer. Microsoft has kept old software working pretty much unchanged for the last 20 years. I know, I still have software built on early Windows 95/NT4 that works fine on Windows 11...and with some registry tweaks Windows 11 will run on a computer from 2005 without too many issues (sure, 3rd party security software and js-heavy web pages will be slow but that is not directly MS fault). Windows 10 EOL in 2025 is only for consumer level stuff, you can get Windows 10 support for enterprise for another 2 years at least and some versions even up to 2029, so again, if you are a business, you are taken care of (if you are "cheaping" you way with Windows Home and Pro in business then you kind of get what you pay for, I am sure you as a business don't give away free products/services for years on end). And you can keep using your Windows 10 after EOL, not like they lock you out, they just don't support you...just like you don't repair stuff for free after warranty end. Compare that to any other tech company that churns through HW and SW much faster and much more severely where old HW and SW no longer works or cannot connect to the internet or use the latest browser so you cannot connect to the latest HTTPS servers. Even open source software breaks compatibilty with older versions much more oftern than Microsoft, but since that is "free" people just shrug it off.

cess11OP11mo ago

We're building the business, i.e. setting the foundations we expect to stand on for decades to come. Enterprise license that might be possible to extend into the medium term isn't good enough for our long term commitments and the time to adapt to an alternative family of operating systems is now.

As for stability, if you learned GUI Ubuntu twenty years ago you'll be right at home in contemporary Debian systems, while someone hopping from XP or Server 2000 into 10 or 11 would be quite confused for quite some time. Xenial (2016), Bionic (2018) and Fossa (2020) will likely get twenty years of security updates each, into the beginning of the 2030s.

I think something similar holds for the SoftMaker office suite. If you learned TextMaker twenty years ago I believe you'll be less annoyed by their 2024 release than if you learned Office 2003 and get dropped into the 365 style applications. Personally I'd use something else entirely, likely doing a roundtrip through LaTeX or straight PostScript under the hood, but it will be interesting to evaluate some MICROS~1 Office alternatives in my organisation and see what, if anything, sticks.

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nikanj11mo ago

Microsoft's primary business is software running on Microsoft platforms. In the past that was Windows, nowadays it's also Azure.

That famous "developers developers developers" video with Steve Ballmer was a prime example of that corporate ethos.

For most other giant companies in tech, either the primary business is selling a product (and killing competitors) or giving products away as loss leaders and making bank on advertisement

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