Novell solved directory services 25 years ago. It took MS 10 to catch up.

If you are a large corporation or government, you'd have the resources to do exactly that. I keep hearing about European governments moving to Linux. And why wouldn't you? Screw perpetual licensing.

I present to you a wild notion:

Adobe OS.

They have the market value and revenue to do what steam is doing.

They could make switching a cost save if the OS integrates vertically with the creative cloud.

To be clear, I don't want this and would t use it. But any business with licenses would say "wait... Ditch Microsoft ios, and... Poof? Everything works and we pay way less money?"

All that Microsoft provides any business at this point is AD/Azure.

I feel like Microsoft is taking massive Ls between now and 2030. I don't think Adobe is gonna do this, I'm just saying if they did, it could work. Microsoft is a weak giant right now.

AD and LDAP is notoriously insecure as hell by default. It took until 24H2 for MSFT to enable SMB signing, which was a solid 50% chance for an unauthenticated attacker to reach domain admin on any enterprise network.

There are a lot of solutions that eclipse AD in both quality and scope. It's just like VMWare, a once solid product that orgs got vendor locked into, and are stuck for life.

The CD-I was at least like footnoteworthy.

I got the same treatment recently. All tech departments were issued M4 Mac Book Pros because that was more cost effective than than dealing with the non-compliant fuckery of W11. Unfortunately non-tech departments got the old inventory and are suffering the abhorrent instability of W11. It somehow refuses to play nice with just about everything in our corporate ecosystem.

When I started at my current job, every new hire was given the choice of a MacBook or Linux laptop. I only encountered one person who chose the former and he only chose that because he thought it'd be funny to use Windows on a MacBook in his professional environment. (We were allowed to do pretty much whatever with our laptops so long as we could fulfill our work duties. My then manager replaced Ubuntu, with which we were provided, with Arch on his laptop.)

Two or so years later, the IT department said that they didn't really know how to maintain security compliance on Linux, but they did know JAMF. Thus, they took away our customizable Linux laptops and foisted MacBooks on all of us. I'm pretty sure even the Windows guy lost that, but he was an exec so it probably took longer.

I still remember when they announced that this would happen. They said it without a timeline in the company-wide group chat and someone I respected previously and respected more afterwards said "so when are you taking away our good laptops?"

But macOS is even more locked down than windows?

This is definitely becoming more common. I've seen Macs steadily gain market share in my organization because the Windows machines are locked down in such draconian ways that they become unusable, but somehow they allow much better user experiences on Macs as an option, so most people go that direction.

As someone who went through this, I would honestly take Window 11's bs over pos unusable mac.

First time ever I think I felt pain in my wrist from using a trackpad. Absolute clownshow of a UX

Can you install linux on a mac?

Not finance but I always bring this up when ppl argue about android vs iPhone.

Tons and tons of businesses prefer the Apple ecosystem because it just fucking works.

they screwed up not making ps3s have ps2 backwards compatability outside the first lot of them released. its what ultimately caused me to be an xbox fan because for christmas my dad was gonna get the family a ps3 but when he found out they were no longer backward compatable with ps2 games he got us an xbox 360 instead

they intentionally screwed them up to sell more ps2s. i'm (for the last fifteen years, thank gods) on my third.

The PS3 including a BD drive certainly played a part though.

MS tried to push HD-DVD but required a separate device to use it on 360.

It feels like that was the generation of poor console decisions.

Are we past said peak, then?

Nobody sees it that way, nobody notices what we notice. They don't know any alternatives, it has new features so it's innovating, it does what they want/need. I hear no complaints, only from tech people who are invested in privacy and digital sovereignty. That's the reality.

At least we can all agree that Tay was an AI revolutionary way ahead of "her" time. /s

That's where it's heading. Because why would I use software I don't trust at home? New entrepreneurs will be using Linux because it doesn't sell their data.

Usually Microsoft releases new versions quickly enough to leap-frog each other, though. Windows 98 was still supported when Windows XP was released, so nobody really needed to use WinME. The same thing happened with Windows Vista and 8. People could always just skip over the especially-shitty versions and wait for the next, not-quite-as-shitty version to come out before upgrading. They can't do that with Windows 11, though.

It does more or less follow the age-old Microsoft pattern: One disaster OS, followed by one improved OS people mostly enjoy.

Only problem for them is that this time there's actually way more viable OS options for average people to turn to, and they've simultaneously leaned heavily into surveillance capitalism, monitoring, and AI when all of those things are broadly unwelcome. Its a recipe for a big loss in market share, and I can't say I don't love that for them.