Just spent the weekend moving to Kubuntu. It only took about 5 hours and my computer is snappier than it’s ever been. I have been on Windows for 30 years. Microsoft, you should be scared. You can’t compete with free competition.
The only way to meaningfully compete with freeware is a feature advantage: if your revenue can sponsor developers to focus on polishing and improving your system beyond the free alternatives, there will be a market of people willing to pay for (immediately*) better products.
It’s what keeps Excel a step ahead of Calc: between a rather clunky UX and frankly awful documentation for some features and functions, Libre just doesn’t quite have the same maturity. It’s good enough for the majority of use cases, okay for some more and I’m really only aware of one feature I miss (Power Query or equivalent) or haven’t found. But it’s not as polished, and for some, that alone is reason enough to stick with paid products.
Conversely, it’s why more people are starting to move off of Windows: between user experience improvements, smoother installation, the spreading realisation that most stuff happens in browsers anyways and Proton making a lot of gaming a lot more accessible, Windows is losing that edge in features. If the list of anti-features and drawbacks grows large enough, the familiarity alone just doesn’t hold people any more.
You can compete with free competition, but that requires an eye on the market. And performance-impeding spyware just isn’t must-have for everyone.
*as opposed to supporting open source devs to the point where they could focus on their software, hopefully leading to better products some time later, which is less gratifying and less reliable than paying for a project you get right now
Windows has different design pressures. They have painted themselves into a corner and can no longer afford to manage it. If they make sweeping changes they break the number 1 rule of windows, maintain legacy compatibility wherever possible. If companies have to buy new, it’s a harder sell for Microsoft because there are better, cheaper options out there they can’t compete with. Their own ecosystem is holding them back and they cannot do anything about it.
Just spent the weekend moving to Kubuntu. It only took about 5 hours and my computer is snappier than it’s ever been. I have been on Windows for 30 years. Microsoft, you should be scared. You can’t compete with free competition.
The only way to meaningfully compete with freeware is a feature advantage: if your revenue can sponsor developers to focus on polishing and improving your system beyond the free alternatives, there will be a market of people willing to pay for (immediately*) better products.
It’s what keeps Excel a step ahead of Calc: between a rather clunky UX and frankly awful documentation for some features and functions, Libre just doesn’t quite have the same maturity. It’s good enough for the majority of use cases, okay for some more and I’m really only aware of one feature I miss (Power Query or equivalent) or haven’t found. But it’s not as polished, and for some, that alone is reason enough to stick with paid products.
Conversely, it’s why more people are starting to move off of Windows: between user experience improvements, smoother installation, the spreading realisation that most stuff happens in browsers anyways and Proton making a lot of gaming a lot more accessible, Windows is losing that edge in features. If the list of anti-features and drawbacks grows large enough, the familiarity alone just doesn’t hold people any more.
You can compete with free competition, but that requires an eye on the market. And performance-impeding spyware just isn’t must-have for everyone.
*as opposed to supporting open source devs to the point where they could focus on their software, hopefully leading to better products some time later, which is less gratifying and less reliable than paying for a project you get right now
Windows has different design pressures. They have painted themselves into a corner and can no longer afford to manage it. If they make sweeping changes they break the number 1 rule of windows, maintain legacy compatibility wherever possible. If companies have to buy new, it’s a harder sell for Microsoft because there are better, cheaper options out there they can’t compete with. Their own ecosystem is holding them back and they cannot do anything about it.
Windows 11 literally broke legacy compatibility deliberately, it refused to install on older hardware. So probably not rule #1 any more.
It broke legacy hardware compatibility. Sorry I should have been more specific. They need to maintain software compatibility.