It really is a masterpiece.

For a site chock full of logic-worshippers, we do seem to forget Occam's Razor too frequently.

the tech bro demographic is terrible at self reflection or solving problems that involve their own biases

very smart people can rationalize themselves into or out of anything position

That's true of any human. It's just particularly bad for tech bros because they base their entire personality on their supposed hyper-rationalism.

My older brother and I were pirating software from BBSes before the World Wide Web existed.

Talk about being there when the deep magic was written.

Or buying CDs packed with software from markets. In Glasgow you could get copies of loads of high-end software from traders in the Barras market.

Exchanging "emails" over FidoNet was so cool

It's not about the trustworthiness of the output. That won't improve, it's systemic. It's about the undue trust many people put in those inherently untrustworthy outputs (whereas untrustworthy doesn't always imply useless).

You can... you just need to make about $100,000,000,000 USD in profits each year, that's all.

Not even remotely true.

You're making the exact same argument everyone here is making, and that's because you're attempting to argue from technical parity / superiority. Windows isn't the dominant desktop OS because of it's technical superiority to Linux, it's dominant because of deeply entrenched compliance and industry reasons.

Healthcare, finance, legal, engineering (less so today, but still very sub-discipline dependant), and government all have very specific software needs that no one in their right mind will bother writing new software, or rewriting existing software, would do for 6% desktop market share.

EMR programs (Epic, Cerner, Meditech), Practice management and billing, Tax and compliance, Legal discovery and case-management tools, Niche hardware and it's control software

This is all the realm of Windows. Most of these applications are Windows-only (Win32 / .NET / ActiveX legacy), they're only certified and validated on Windows, and they're only contractually supported on Windows.

Even if Wolters-Kluwer rewrote the entire CCH ProSystem fx suite for Linux, now there's recertification, regulatory review, vendor retraining, staff retraining, potential issues with auditors and regulators, etc.

There's currently no upside large enough to justify: Vendor finger-pointing, Compliance risk, Training costs, Downtime risk

It's negative ROI all the way down.

Windows has to become so bad that switching to Linux for desktops overcomes all of the above.

Can you understand why someone would buy a $20 Mr. Coffee coffeemaker from Walmart and not a $2000 DeLonghi Eletta Explore superautomatic espresso machine?

Microsoft slowly becomes IBM.

That's "what then".

It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years.

BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows.

Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.

Heavy sigh.

That's the joke, sir. Or ma'am.