Now, what I like from MS in the current situation:
- I understand the phone was axed and I like the focus on MS doing what it knows best and stops draining money.
- In that regard I also understand a shift to Chromium for Edge.
But what I don't like:
- Bundles that take too much out of our pockets for us loyal years long customers.
- Uncertainty if my most used products - outlook.com, bing.com and Edge will stop existing because it doesn't fit the enterprise mantra.
Do us, ordinary computer users even have a chance, because at best the signals from Microsoft are mixed, but the company under Nadella seems to be completely okay with forcing us to go to Google, and even patting our backs as we do.
Software as a service is going to continue at Microsoft and that means fees. And in the absence of any upfront fees, some pretty blatant advertising with lots of "privacy options" and "disclaimers". Apple, Google, Amazon already do this to run services similar to Azure and Office 365. (Basically a bunch of old MS-SQL databases and Windows Server domain services 'in the cloud'). The obsession with running Windows Server comes down to the fact that even though its probably quite more cost effective to run some variation of Linux or FreeBSD, in a large-scale enterprise, it may actually be easier to eliminate actual hardware operational costs, move this into the cloud, and run everything from Windows-land on Microsoft's cloud system and with virtualized hardware.
I mean when you think about it, its kind of crazy, that even Chrome itself is an operating system (or conversely, can be compiled to operate as one), and yes, Microsoft is throwing in the towel when it comes to Edge, and joining Chromium, where they would have somewhat direct input into how that project develops. And the acquisition of Github by them, as well as IBM's purchase of RedHat announced last year, shows that this is an insurance policy to keep the money flowing.
If you think about it, once its a service and not a product, you are going to incur the wrath of some fee one way or the other. A good example of this, I think, would be Adobe making all their products cloud-based a few years ago. Now if you stop paying them, you can't even buy a copy (or license) to run Photoshop.
So yes, I think, there is a lot of truth in what you are thinking. Some Microsoft version of a web browser will probably always exist, however. Even if they adopt Chromium for the back-end of things, they are still going to brand it as a Microsoft product. Bing still has close to 20% market share and brings in Microsoft multi-billion dollars. Its not that its not profitable, its just that Google, with its own ecosystem, is far more valuable to advertisers and partners.
The failure of Microsoft to dominate the cellphone/tablet industry is actually a really big deal. Because basically, if you look back in time, Microsoft came out with a product called WINDOWS TABLET PC in 2001. However these things were bulky behemoths that ran XP. MS even had something called Windows for Pen Computing in 1992. So that idea was there, and then Apple (and subsequently Google) just ran away with the idea. So there is a lot to that whole debacle regarding mobile computing. That is a lot of potential money to lose. So they are going to continue to adopt this service model that has been so successful for Apple and Google, and even Amazon, I'd say. Death of PC greatly exaggerated, of course, but putting all bets on Windows forever is not a great idea. Ultimately, Microsoft has made a huge amount of money from its business software and that will probably continue. Not very excited about any web browser version of Microsoft Word, but as they keep trying to blur the line between what a web browser actually is, that could very well change. You see them trying to do this with the Modern UI apps for, well, basically years now. Not sure a single person I know actually intentionally uses these apps, but they are there for a very well orchestrated and strategic reason. And that is the idea of a "fenced/walled store" model of doing things that, particularly, Apple, Google, and Amazon have adopted.
Of course this comes back to:
Do us, ordinary computer users even have a chance, because at best the signals from Microsoft are mixed, but the company under Nadella seems to be completely okay with forcing us to go to Google, and even patting our backs as we do.
I used to say that all Satya Nadella ever did was talk about cloud computing non-stop and that is very true. But that was mostly to prepare MS for a very radical shift in order to compete with companies like Google and Apple. For instance, people who like Apple products tend to stay in Apple land. Instead of being a facilitator for software, it is more profitable to sell services directly and also act as a facilitator. And this is something Google seems to have mastered and that Microsoft is catching up with, particularly by adopting this "Microsoft 365" all-in-one solution. At the end of the day it is about what creates profit, tangible goods/services to the consumer, and meets the expectation of the majority of their shareholders. There is always going to be a space for physical hardware whereas your whole desktop system is not going to be "not needed". But its role will change. People who are more likely to create content or be part of a larger collaboration still use these systems. Or need a lot of processing power. As you see now, a lot of people are happy to settle on what are basically very basic systems (something that would run Chrome OS perhaps) to access their e-mails and open/edited documents. The issue is that there is just a lot of computing power, and really, I'd say, it occurred to these companies that they could sell this computing power at a premium and manage it as a resource "in the cloud". This is worth a lot of money, with companies like Facebook and Netflix depending on that kind of distributed computing power being available worldwide at all times.
