I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software.
You only get windows laptops and desktop from Microsoft, but they are highly secure (similar to what apple achieves).
Everything else needs a windows pro license (with tight checks).
I’m fairly sure that would improve windows’ security posture by a huge lot.
Because Microsoft isn't a software company anymore, and never was a hardware company. They're services-first now.
They make the majority of their money from businesses with lucrative support contracts, Azure, Active Directory + Office Enterprise suite, etc.
They make the majority of their money from consumers via stuffing Windows with "promotions" (ads) and from Office 365. It is services. Windows barely earns them anything.
Hell, the fact that they're thinking about opening up the Xbox to Steam and have official tutorials on running Gamepass on iOS and Linux should tell you that they don't care what OS on which device you use, so long as you are subscribed to their services.
In an environment like that, a vertical integration play makes little sense. You want your services to be on as many platforms as possible, not attract ire and roadblocks from your partners.
On top of that, they don't have a phone platform onboarding people to the whole hardware ecosystem. Even for Apple, Mac + iPad + AirPod profits are dwarfed by iPhone profits.
I think it’s a matter of competition / market segmentation. People choose Microsoft partially for the reason it doesn’t lock down things as much in their ecosystem as much as Apple does.
If they want to compete with Apple using Apple’s strategy, they may face a losing battle.
I believed that too until I used a Mac for my daily driver. The experience of developing on a machine with native Bash, a relatively mature package handler, and air-tight device integration was MUCH better than Microsoft’s frequently annoying cruft, unexplained crashes, and horrible program management (we won’t call them “packages”, as they tend to leak all over the system with mixed success “uninstalling” them).
> a relatively mature package handler
What package handler ? Installing things on macOS is still a mixed bag of disk images with the app to move yourself, or .pkg files or the App Store.
The thing is so broken that brew is the first thing I install on a new Mac.
> What package handler ?
they're probably referring to homebrew. which quite honestly, makes MacOS barely bearable. The terminology sucks and the ruby language doesn't help. MacOS without homebrew is unbearable.
With downside of company that will toss backwards compatibility out the second someone at Cupertino gets mad.
Microsoft backwards compatibility got them massive market share but also backed them into a corner. Package Managers only work if there is some constrants but I came across software that was dropping .ini files into C:\Windows\System32 in 2017.
Developers are not the only ones using windows. Software installation UX is much better and controlled in a windows environment than a unix environment.
> Software installation UX is much better and controlled in a windows environment than a unix environment
unix: pkg-add, apt, rpm etc. Windows: intallshield, Teams' "stealth, backdoor like" installer, Office's "annoying" installer, etc. Basically: every program on Windows has its own installer.
Windows S mode is sort of like this, it mostly only lets you install sandboxed apps from the store. But a lot of Windows security advisories (and from what I can recall most browser sandbox escapes) are actually from random half-assed features tacked on to privileged Windows services that ship with the install, so I’m not sure how much it would help. The Windows architecture has never done a good job of limiting attack surface.
See the sibling comment, but also wanted to add - they tried something similar with the Windows 11 TPM requirements and people lost their goddamn minds and refused to install it. (Which was justified IMO.) I don’t think a full conversion would go over well with Windows users
There's one where I think it could have made sense, the xbox. They're apparently confident enough about security on those systems as a large part of the point is that they act as locked down game players (related to AMD's work on securing servers IIRC), so adding a locked down 'desktop mode' would seem viable. They'd need to be certain it doesn't enable any new jailbreaks so either mode isn't more useful than they intend, if they wanted people to buy/subscribe to office direct from the store they don't want libreoffice working.
During covid and the supply/demand mismatch as everyone rushed to WFH I was wondering if they could repurpose the cheap S xboxes as cheap desktops. Essentially a reversal of the original 'xbox as a trojan horse' idea, instead of using consoles to get windows in the living room, it's to get windows in the home office.
It's not Microsoft's hardware; the OEMs are a real constraint. As is Intel. The market has been remarkably effective at resisting vertical consolidation, even if it's an uneasy truce.
Besides, the antitrust regulators would absolutely hate this.
>I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software.
I think they are tried with secure boot, but pushback from Linux people and maybe fear of anti-trust stopped them (for now).
And maybe if they do this, hardware vendors may fear a market split where they loose Linux people to other vendors. Not that many people but it still is revenue loss. I know I will never ever bye a microsoft only device. Bad enough Smart phones are locked down, at least I can ignore the phone.
I’ve never understood the fascination with perceiving Secure Boot as ushering in an age of tech serfdom. From almost the beginning, they signed Red Hat’s boot shim which made it totally useless for locking people to Windows. I don’t think this was ever the plan, and the motivations aren’t there unless you buy all that stuff about every huge tech company hating “universal computers” on principle. Linux is not a measurable thorn in Microsoft’s side on the desktop market, and they don’t have nearly enough leverage to make OEMs stop selling Linux servers.
Because IBM/RHEL pays Microsoft for the key (shim). Plus with Linus/BSD, once boot starts their own microcode is loaded.
Secure boot as far as Linux is concerned is extortion from the users.
I’m guessing the source for Red Hat having to pay to have the shim signed is “I made it the fuck up”, but even if it was true I’m not going to cry about an IBM subsidiary paying money to give me a free service. And this is all ignoring the fact that I’ve never encountered an x86 motherboard that didn’t let you set your own keys.
> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software.
One of the reasons they're still much more prevalent than Apple is because they don't.
They tried that a couple of times --- Windows RT, Windows S Mode... the latter is at least still in use.
yeah they tried to re-invent something that has been already invented, and failed (of course).
they should copy 1-to-1 what apple does, since it's a proven strategy. it's also proven that it's not a monopoly (in the us, at least), so it's a safe game to play.
It'd be nice to have consumer windows laptops that are as safe as macbooks, because Microsoft can enforce the presence of TPM and can drop hardware support when it deems necessary (because it's the only producer of consumer windows laptops).
The problem is, when OPENSTEP was announced as a programming system for the Mac OS, Bill Gates' answer when asked if Microsoft would develop apps for it was, "Develop for it? I'll piss on it." --- which some suspect is why Carbon/Cocoa were referred to as Blue Box/Yellow Box.
To a certain extent it looks like they tried with AI PCs...although not strictly produced only by Microsoft, the AI PCs had higher hardware baseline requirements.
No one seems to care, I expect the AI PCs to eventually sell for 75% discounts.
> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software.
To be honest, I kind of understand they don't want to do that. I bought a Surface Pro 8 some years ago and is probably the worst computing hardware I've experienced in a long time. Even basic things like thermal management is horribly broken when using Windows on it. Running Linux on it gave a slightly better experience, but seems so backwards that they cannot even make their own hardware work well, I thought the combination of hardware+OS by same company would lead to a better experience but nope.
> I thought the combination of hardware+OS by same company would lead to a better experience but nope.
It is the same with their software. It seems that every team is working independently. They are basically not able to release a "distribution" due to this. I wonder how many versions they need to have a unified look and feel like they in Windows 3x and later in NT4 to Win 7.