Has Microsoft defeated Linux?

MS has stricken Linux off the competitor list, as they are slowly moving towards a Cloud lockdown of their customers. MS has seen another opportunity to lock in their sheep^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers. When all documents are tightly secured online on Office 365, and all the rest of the content is available via the Live family, they don't need the stand alone desktop as much anymore.

The biggest cash cow MS has now is Office and Office is dragging Windows along. Since MS has seen the writing on the wall for the PC, or more spelled out, Joe and Jane Schmoe are forgoing the desktop PC for tablets and other gadgets to satisfy their passive content consumption. That is why the first screenshots of Windows 8 are heavily "Tablet-ified". Windows will move to a thin client role.

At first Office was the moat around Windows. Then came the shift that Office was the Crown Jewel that dragged Windows along. In that scenario Linux was effectively a way to bypass MS completely. When MS manages to move their "customers" towards their Cloud lock in, the exit costs will become extremely high. Welcome to the impenetrable "Open Surface". That is why in MS's brave new future Linux isn't on the radar. They will (try to) move to block it with protocol and format shenanigans.

They are probably right with their bet too. So far Joe Consumer hasn't caught on to the fact that Linux can do his computing better and at a fraction of the cost of MS-ware, despite the 20 years of Linux's existence.

I'm not so sure about this. MS hasn't been so successful at leading their customers around by the nose lately; just look at how many businesses still use XP and refuse to upgrade to Vista, and now 7.

While I think MS has plenty of freedom to force whatever they want on home customers, the same isn't true for corporate customers. If they make too many sweeping changes with their next OS, then the corporations aren't going to buy it; they'll just stick with 7, just like they did with Vista which was completely ignored by the corporations. Businesses don't want some stupid tablet-ified OS for their office workers to use, and which causes problems for their IT department; in fact, businesses are generally loathe to change anything once it's working, even if it's working poorly.

Finally, this "cloud" BS isn't going to work at all for corporate customers, where many of their systems sit behind firewalls or might not even be on the internet. Corporations want much more control than that.

I wouldn't be surprised if MS makes two totally different OSes for their next generation: one aimed at consumers and home users, that's "tablet-ified" and perhaps has a lot of cloud tie-in, and one that's aimed at corporate users, with a much more traditional UI that basically looks like a warmed-over version of Win7.

> ...just look at how many businesses still use XP and refuse to upgrade to Vista, and now 7.

Vista, yes. 7, not so much so. The upgrades to 7 are proceeding apace. Business have looked at their existing base of XP machines and realized that they're slowly dying and that they'll have to upgrade soon, and with XP support ending in less than 3 years and an XP machine almost impossible to get now, they're reluctantly decided that Windows 7 is the least bad option.

Finally, this "cloud" BS isn't going to work at all for corporate customers, where many of their systems sit behind firewalls or might not even be on the internet. Corporations want much more control than that.

I work at an Industrial Technology Services Multinational, which is an all Microsoft shop. We have just signed our keys to the kingdom over to a large European IT provider. Our new system is Windows 7 based, but all our data now "lives in the cloud" with that IT provider. I wouldn't be surprised when our new IT overlords propose to put more in the cloud, we will follow.

Incidentally, we just had our first network outage. Everything came to a grinding halt for an hour. Must be the cost of doing business.

MS will have there work cut out for them, I'll admit that, but they are good at manoeuvering while nobody is paying attention. Those not vigilant will find themselves shackled to Windows Azure before they relize they are now MS' property.

> Incidentally, we just had our first network outage. Everything came to a grinding halt for an hour. Must be the cost of doing business.

The company I work for has been trying to roll out a Virtual Desktop Environment for about a year now. We still get kicked out of the system for one reason or another for a couple of hours every few days. And that doesn't count power outages or network outages. But management is firmly convinced it's the only way to fully secure data. We've done our best to explain the limitations, but...

Sounds like LTSP on a virtual server or two. Are they calling the VDE hosting 'vaporware servers' yet?

When I contracted at Sun, everything but the trunk of the filesystem tree on my machine was plugged into that trunk from somewhere else via NFS. Sun liked to talk about "the network is the computer"; watching all the halts and delays on that Solaris box, my opinion became, "the network is the bottleneck".

> Sounds like LTSP on a virtual server or two.

Yeah. It's not like this is anything new. But it's the latest fad in management, apparently. And it will let them roll out Windows 7 without actually upgrading all of their existing hardware.

It actually does make the smoothest remote access solution I've ever used. Far better than most VPN solutions that I've tried. But thinking you can use it to replace your physical machines that people use 8-12 hours a day or more is another matter. Then you consider the specialized and single purpose machines, many of which are portable. And then the users who have to run applications when they're not connected to the network. And then you add in the inevitable network and power outages, and your downtime during critical business hours becomes a significant factor. But like I said, they've been told...

And then you add in local peripherals on certain machines that they need access to in the remote desktop and all the issues there.... We are doing a fair bit of it at the hospital (I believe most of the clinics are using vmware virtual desktops now), and I've seen a few of the issues here and there (we don't directly work with the clinics much though, that's another department's main job).