I am a big fan of Office 365. We currently have no Windows machines in our home but for macOS and Linux, Office 365 provides great value also.
Microsoft 365 is probably a good idea, but Microsoft is missing one consumer product: a great cellphone running Windows and seamlessly working with other Windows devices. Having phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops all seamlessly working together is something that I now insist on. For now, this makes me an Apple customer because iPhone/iPad/MacBook devices work really well together. If Microsoft had a fantastic phone with handoff, they could compete better. (BTW, I briefly owned a Windows 10 laptop a few years ago - bought it just to play with Windows 10. I thought Windows 10 was quite good.)
I'd love a phone on which the "phone" UI was simply on choice of app but could be docked to an HDMI & USB device, then boot up windows and run windows desktop apps. I'm not too fussed if it is a little slow.
Heck, you could even just use the phone's display as a keyboard / touchpad for the windows OS while displaying a desktop on the monitor.
You might. Take you, everyone else who might over the next 10 years, then increase by two orders of magnitude and you are still a tiny drop in the bucket that can't possibly compete. Network effects mean there probably won't be another mobile OS any more than there will be another desktop OS to gain traction. There are the two leaders and everyone else is permanently relegated to <1%.
BTW: I keep seeing people talk about this hybrid concept but I have yet to see a UI toolkit that trivially scales up and down between phone/desktop. It mostly seems to involve a lot of compromises and a lot of extra work.
I would be happy to run two different OSes (and maybe 2 different CPUs), the mobile one getting access to the phone screen and the desktop one with access to the monitor, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (or the phone as touchpad). One or more shared directores for file sync (pictures, videos, downloads, etc)
The problem is that there is no phone with an i7, 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD now. That's my laptop. My phone is a sub 5" Xperia X Compact. 3GB, 32 GB storage, a Snapdragon 600 something. Fast but not suited for the job I'm doing on the laptop.
Then the battery. It would drain as fast as the one of those old laptops that need to have theirs replaced.
We're still not there and I not sure there is a market for that. Maybe we'll get there by inertia once batteries and cycles per Watt will allow it. The direction we are headed now for this use case is the phone CPU driving a smart terminal to a powerful remote computer, with attached monitor and input peripheral.
>BTW: I keep seeing people talk about this hybrid concept but I have yet to see a UI toolkit that trivially scales up and down between phone/desktop. It mostly seems to involve a lot of compromises and a lot of extra work.
Except I don't care about desktopified android/iOS/windows phone apps. All I want is to run my already existing open source desktop linux applications. Chroot on android doesn't have hardware acceleration and you have to use VNC for anything graphical.
That's precisely what a fully-realized Continuum experience would be. Using the latest Windows on ARM with x86 emulation and the Composable Shell (CShell) [1] would give you a great experience.
Note that the Lumia 950 with the current production of Continuum is effectively a technology demo of that model since it doesn't have x86 emulation [2] and therefore can't run the full breadth of Windows applications. That said, Continuum already does use the Phone's display as a keyboard, mouse, or just a second display according to your preference.
> a great cellphone running Windows and seamlessly working with other Windows devices.
They tried and failed, very little chance they will try another shot at this, their brand is not associated with quality phones and it will be extremely hard to get developers to work on apps because they will believe the platform will be abandoned.
I think you are right - they would have to fund the development of popular apps themselves, at least for a while. That said, I use few third party apps on my iPhone and iPad (preferring a web browser and mobile apps when possible). But yes, it would be expensive to seed their app store with enough apps for people to get their work done.
They have been trying for years. I still have several emails from before I retired offering $250 MS point gift cards or Xbox One consoles just for submitting an app for approval.
Once they get the x86 emulation on arm working, the problem goes away. They can start running apps from the windows store. I highly doubt they're done unless Intel follows through on a lawsuit and wins.
I'm still getting insider OS updates on my Lumia phone. Their Build conference this year also had the Windows Phone on a bunch of banners hanging all over the conference, even though no one talked about it. Seems like something is brewing...
> With Build 16251, we are introducing the first set of features that enable “linking” your phone to your PC. This build’s scenario is focused on cross-device web-browsing. Today, we’re asking for you Windows Insiders to help us test this experience out using your Android phones. Support for iPhone is coming very soon, stay tuned.
I hope they open up all their APIs, then lean on the phone duopoly (iOS and Android) to do the same, enabling cross-OS handoff. Maybe even throw in some accusations of monopoly/duopoly abuse to ironically expedite the features along.
I think the cheapest version is $70 a year. I'm still using office 2007 which cost about the same but has lasted 10 years. I dont think this software rental trend is anything about great value.
For a document editor or spreadsheet, continuous or even regular updates aren't important as long as it has the base features you need.
When you have a CRM that integrates with other systems, an accounting package that has to stay up to date with policies and laws, or even an IDE that can support numerous languages, regular updates are more valuable and in some cases necessary.
I used Office 2000 until I decommissioned my last Windows machine (dual boot even then) in 2010/11.
For me, Office and Windows upgrades are just a useless time waster. I'd be happy with Office 2000 if it weren't for the fact that the only thing I use it for is collaboration.
As a solution, I just set up a copy of Server 2016 Essentials, set the telemetry mode to "security" (which is easier said than done -- you have to go through an active directory server!) and installed Office 2016 Home + Student on it.
The lowest price for that Office SKU is $75 on Amazon at the moment, but normal retail is about twice that. It looks like they support current office releases for about 4 years, so I figure $40/year if I stay on the upgrade train and pay full price.
Server 2016 security updates end in 2026, and it retails for $400, so another $40/yr.
This all goes in a VM running on a low wattage (already always on) box, so it will hopefully update + reboot itself when I'm not around. Time will tell.
Electricity for my physical desktops running windows was $10's per month (windows refused to stay suspended...), and my incremental hardware costs are $0, so this is a lot less expensive than it looks.
Plus, this gets rid of the vast majority of the Win 10 spyware in a supported way, and future proofs against most hardware compatibility problems.
That $70 is effectively a bundle with OneDrive, getting you 1 Tb of cloud storage. If you only need Office, and upgrade rarely, it doesn't make much sense. But seeing how many people pay similar money for Dropbox alone, for example, it can definitely be a great value proposition.
Dropbox + Libreoffice is similar, yes. Also dropbox is way faster, runs on linux, and easy to script against. Oh, and onedrive consistently crashes on my win 10. But yeah, feature-list-wise, onedrive isn't bad if you're a MS fanboy.
That's weird that OneDrive crashes consistently on your W10. How much data do you have on it? It doesn't crash on our family computer which is always an old computer. And on Mac it crashes maybe once a quarter. I have hundreds of gigs on it so that's not so bad.
MS fanboy remark seems weird. I'm guessing you'll just think I'm an MS fanboy. Which would be silly, I use Apple products far more among other companies. OneDrive might actually be the only Microsoft app I use consistently.
Just a few gig in a directory at work. Gave up syncing it after spending several days alternating between crashing, eating 100% CPU, and popping up error messages. Yes 1 TB is nice but you can't get to it!
Damn. This is OneDrive personal, not Business? You said work so if it's OneDrive for business that isn't really OneDrive. It's just their enterprise stuff with OneDrive as the name. Like Skype business or whatever they call that.
Normal OneDrive which is what comes with the $80/year/5 people Office 365 isn't perfect. A few issues/features that they should have finished by now, but I'd be really surprised if regular OneDrive was causing those amt of issues.
Just a few gig in a directory at work. Gave up syncing it after spending several days alternating between crashing, eating 100% CPU, and popping up error messages. Yes 1 TB is nice but you can't get to it!
I don't know about the personal OneDrive offering but on OneDrive for Business it's pretty much impossible to fill 1TB because the client will crash and burn far before reaching the limit.
I think OneDrive for Business is like the Skype Business (not sure the name) issue. Where they just renamed it. The exe was still Lynx.exe for some time.
I have had over 500GB syncing on OneDrive before via an office 365 account. It was fine. It would crash or mess up a lot more in early 2016 and 2015. But has been pretty good in the past year.
OneDrive still has issues though.
It doesn't understand symlinks and it doesn't allow far too many special characters in file names.
OneDrive for Business used to have something to do with SharePoint (as in, that's where it would sync those files). That would probably account for a lot of problems with it. ;)
Yeah most likely. I use Onedrive a ton (200+ GB), so the normal one still has a few issues that are annoying - primarily some special characters not being allowed, no symlinking, and I don't think it does file history well compared to Drive or Dropbox.
The standard edition which lists for $99/yr is ~$80/yr on Amazon and on sale elsewhere. That version is Office Home. Good for 5 people (like my family of 5) - Word / Excel / Powerpoint / Outlook / OneNote / Publisher / Access.
equivalent office 2007 for 5 family members is like $750? That's 10 years of 365, with no feature update (if you like that sort of thing) and no onedrive.
Microsoft strategy with Windows 10 was to encourage developers to write UWP apps so they could eliminate the app gap in Windows 10 Mobile.
Good strategy in theory, but looking at the Windows Store today, it seems like developers are not that interested in UWP and frankly, who can blame them?
If you want to write a tablet app, you target the iPad because it's the best product in that category. If you want to write a phone app, you target Android and iOS because that's where the money is today.
Is there good money to be made writing UWP at the moment? In my opinion, UWP apps on desktop are inferior to "classic" Windows apps. Windows 10 Mobile is pretty much dead at this point, so what's the point of UWP, what's the true benefit?
This is probably where Windows 10S (pushed in education) comes into play. It's a version that offers "secure & superior" performance over normal Win10. Since 10S can only install from the Store app, devs are `forced` to port their app.
Only time will tell how effective this strategy is. I for one would love for this to succeed if it means better security for users (especially on older, technologically challenged folks)
Well, I don't see how Windows 10S helps push adoption of UWP since you can already distribute Windows Forms, WPF, or Win32 desktop apps on the Store today. At that point, why bother making a UWP app?
Also, Edge only have a handful of extensions. If they want to compete against Chrome, they have to do something about that, otherwise people will just use Chromebooks.
UWP will handle touch-enabled Win10 devices better. And while it's not a segment anywhere near the size of iPad, it's still there, so if you can reach it, why not?
The problem is that right now, doing UWP means no Win7 support, and that's a far larger segment - there are twice as many Win7 installs as there are all Win10 installs, and Win10 tablets would be positively minuscule in comparison. So this will change if and when Win10 becomes the dominant Windows desktop OS.
Win 10S can run desktop apps that have been "converted" using the Desktop App Converter (nee Centennial) and uploaded to the Store. This is how iTunes will be coming to the Store later this year.
Currently the only device shipping with 10S is the Surface Laptop, and it can be upgraded to regular Windows 10 Pro for free for the rest of the year.
I suspect that step 1 of the Surface Laptop setup experience for users-in-the-know will be to do this upgrade, just like "uninstall craplets" has been for previous Windows laptops.
I feel like it's more likely that the Education apps they're trying to push to UWP would be ported to the web. I am a firm believer that there are places where desktop apps make more sense but from a market standpoint, porting to UWP gives you access to Win 10/10S but porting to the web gives you Win 10/10S, iPhone, Android, Windows 7, OS X, Chromebooks, etc. That's a lot more coverage for your dollars spent.
Not to mention a decent path to Electron (mac, windows, linux native-ish) and Cordova (android, ios native-ish). React-native is conceptually better than UWP at this point.
I can't see any compelling reason to use UWP. Functionality is limited, runs only on Win 10, Windows 10 mobile is dead. Why would you use it over WPF, Winforms or going straight to a web app?
As consequence of the traditional WinDev vs DevTools relationship, WinRT did not care for a good story.
Worse, it forced devs to write the app three times because the APIs were not the same between phone, tablet and desktop.
Window 8.1, helped a bit with the Universal Apps model. Then the business code could be shared between platforms, but the views (XAML) still needed to be written three times.
Finally UWP was supposed to be back into one single code base for all platforms, but it still lacks polish.
One area is that .NET Native imposes restrictions on .NET code and they are still improving on that area.
Another burning point was that they dropped raw 2D APIs from .NET, forcing anyone that wanted accelerated graphics to go write DirectX code with C++/CX or C++/WRL. Forcing them to make Win2D available.
This is also one of the reasons why Visual Layer was later introduced.
C++ devs also don't know much what to expect.
Initially there was C++/CX and C++/WRL, then Kenny Kerr got hired to work on C++/WinRT, which would support UWP but with standard C++ instead of the extensions used by the former.
C++/WinRT is still WIP after two years, and C++ almost vanished from Microsoft UWP related presentations. The majority of C++ talks are always related to standards support, or OS X/Linux/Android related tooling support.
No word when C++/WinRT will reach feature parity with C++/CX, be supported on Blend or even actually integrated into Visual Studio.
Meanwhile HoloLens and Visual Layer graphical coding presentations are done with C#.
A real pity, because UWP is what I wish .NET would have been since version 1.0 built on COM and AOT compiled to native code, but Microsoft doesn't seem to get it right how to send an uniform message to the developers to build up confidence.
Didn't the problems start even before that? Windows 7 phone was the first new phone platform from Microsoft and was widely regarded as pretty good by the pundits. It had a whole new set of APIs though compared to Win32 (as could be expected), based on a Silverlight-like platform IIRC. Then Microsoft changed all of the APIs again for phone 8 as you outlined. That really scared off a lot of developers I think. Who would be willing to code for something so unstable? 2 new sets of APIs in as many years, with no kind of overlap or migration plan.
All these changes had their reasoned explanations back in the day: the install base was small so it didn't have much impact and they were removing cruft each time, but with hindsight it was a really bad way to go about creating a healthy ecosystem.
As a c++ developer it has been indeed impossible to figure out what ui stack to use from Microsoft. We ended up choosing Qt because it seemed to have much lesser roadmap uncertainty.
It's hard for me to personally see what I'd gain from Microsoft ecosystem + Microsoft phone over Microsoft ecosystem + iOS/Android apps, since their suite of apps for those platforms are quite good.
I have no interest in dockable phones or app handoff or any of that; never saw the point of it when using iOS + OS X, don't miss it now that I'm on Windows/Linux/Android.
Personally I'm fan of Google's Office Suite because it works so nicely via web browser, regardless of device type. It makes the device and OS irrelevant.
That kind of misses the point of the article though.
> Having phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops all seamlessly working together is something that I now insist on.
Yes, this is the problem Microsoft needs to focus on. 'A great cell phone running Windows' solves a problem for Microsoft. It's a self-centric view. Microsoft could make everything run seamlessly if they focused on that, instead of Windows on everything and walled gardens.
Post monopoly business model reminds me of RIM holding back BBM from iOS and Android devices before Whatsapp and other inter-operating system messaging platforms ate their lunch.
Would be interested in seeing companies that similar to IBM as Ben mentions, kept similar assets, but built new business models around them to accommodate a changing marketplace.
Which is a shame really... Blackberry could have been much larger if they'd released a paid app tethered to their services on the backend for Android and iOS, provided the app was at least as good as the BBM experience to their users.
I knew Gerstner pulled off a minor miracle at IBM, but I had no idea that he also basically described AWS years before AWS (see the footnote at the end of the "IBM's cloud miss" section). That's another corporate what-if for the ages; IBM must still be kicking themselves for letting him go.
Occasionally I like to reread the introduction in the Corbato, Vyssotsky Multics paper from 1965. It's amazing how long these kinds of ideas were around.
"Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is a comprehensive, general-purpose programming system which is being developed as a research project. The initial Multics system will be implemented on the GE 645 computer. One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility. Such systems must run continuously and reliably 7 days a week, 24 hours a day in a way similar to telephone or power systems, and must be capable of meeting wide service demands: from multiple man-machine interaction to the sequential processing of absentee-user jobs; from the use of the system with dedicated languages and subsystems to the programming of the system itself; and from centralized bulk card, tape, and printer facilities to remotely located terminals. Such information processing and communication systems are believed to be essential for the future growth of computer use in business, in industry, in government and in scientific laboratories as well as stimulating applications which would be otherwise undone."
There are some amazing ideas from that era. In 1985 Jim Gray described how to create hardware and software with a MTBF of decades, yet other than the few people using Erlang those ideas have been ignored ever since.
I gotta point out that Jim was roughly one era after Multics. His career ramped up during the mass replacement of navigational databases with relational solutions.
Industry and academia were pretty terrible about giving the navigational people credit, or even citing/preserving their work (try getting a copy of a paper from the CODASYL proceedings to see what I mean).
Gray strongly disapproved of all that, so I doubt he would want credit for the previous generation's contributions.
Anyway, the old hierarchical/navigational/codasyl stuff was mostly forgotten, then reinvented (poorly, at first) as key value stores turned into document databases, etc.
Something similar happened with containers, etc. I think the end product of the current generation will surpass the old stuff in most ways, but it is painful to know the history and watch train wrecks of obvious implementation mistakes.
With so many major vendors of professional software switching to the software rental model, I'm hoping for an open source renaissance from the bottom-up.
That may be true in many cases, but I find ubuntu/gnome is way out in front of windows 10 when it comes to UX. Windows 10 is all over the place, every app looks different, some are full screen others aren't. Half the OS is touch friendly but the other half isn't. All sorts of functionality is hidden in slide out menus.
If this is the product of UX designers then I'm glad the OSS world doesn't have any.
I'd say that the OSS UX will always lag in terms of overall polish. But in terms of pushing ideas, they can be ahead of the curve. E.g. gnome 3 (April 2011) did a full screen "start menu" before windows 8 (Aug 2012)
I'm not sure this is a major issue. End users are mainly concerned that when they wake up in the morning, lots of stuff hasn't moved. What it looks like and where it is to start with doesn't seem to matter as long as the UI is discoverable to some extent.
End users are also concerned with not being frustrated at every corner with arcane and weird UI choices or a user experience that plainly mirrors the implementation choices underneath. Worrying about whether features have been moved around the UI usually comes after they've already used a program for a while. There's lots of open-source software that, for non-technical end users, doesn't get to that point because they've ditched it already.
This is akin to "hoping" that there would be renaissance of of VPS/Dedicated hosting.
I'd say there has been a renaissance of of VPS hosting, with DigitalOcean/Vultr and other providers offering a modernized UI, fast service, decent APIs, a few extra services, etc.
There has. Especially from people who have been burned by trying to run the traditional persistent application model on AWS and finding that costs increase rapidly when you want some performance.
Perhaps we need to fund this using, gasp, public funds?
I mean, I bet every government worker around the world needs a computer with an OS and an office suite. G7 countries could pool their resources together to hire engineers and designers and develop common solutions, like a FOSS alternative to Exchange, Windows and Office.
ReacOS would be a good start; it's already an open source clone of Windows.
Public funds have developed plenty of alternatives to Windows. Spain alone had four Linux distros funded by different regional governments. A whole bunch of countries around the world made their own as well.
Suggesting that we bury even more public funds into alternatives to Windows/Office is not helpful unless we can first devise a model that produces something better.
Spain alone had four Linux distros funded by different regional governments.
How is that efficient? What a waste of public funds.
What I am talking about is making ONE operating system for every level of governance. I'm talking about agreements by all party involved to pool their resources to make ONE OS, not 56.
The most popular desktop OS in the world is Windows. People are familiar with it and Win32 apps, so why not use ReactOS as a starting point?
How is that efficient? What a waste of public funds.
That's exactly my point. Getting states to invest in free operating systems is not hard. But your proposal is only useful if it includes some way to get them to work together.
The open source developers are the ones responsible for the software rental model when they started to go PaaS and SaaS, given that it is one of the few secure ways to earn money with FOSS.
How are they supposed to fix the model they created?!
MS culture changed in some ways for the better (their support for Alliance for Open Media is one such example), but in others it remained as bad as it was before (DirectX lock-in, Windows tax and etc.).
This is exactly why I think monopolies are awful, but at the same time not a concern for legislation. Monopolies only persist in the long term - i.e. exist as _true_ monopolies - when enforced with the force of law.
...Excepting of course, Natural Monopolies - which are probably rarer than you might think For example - "Gas" delivery might be considered a natural monopoly - but I know people (in fact, pretty much everyone I know) doesn't care about having a Gas Hookup - they just have someone carry large containers of gas into their kitchen. The things last forever.
I'm not even sure most of those count. Look at energy distribution as an example - I grew up in New Zealand, the country cited. If the monopolist drives prices too high, that'll just encourage people to abandon the grid for alternatives like microgrids.
Right - like I said, even "Natural Monopoly" is less frequent that you might think. Though, in a dense urban area - you don't have a lot of choice over who delivers your power, water, and removes your sewage. Very difficult for competitors to come in and add new distribution lines for each of those in heavily built urban areas (unlike Comms, where lots of ability to add new fiber, new RF, etc...)
Wow I'd never seen this. They should have gone a little bit further though (who builds "houses" in IT? Just turn them into "apps", with hotels turning into "servers" maybe).
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadMicrosoft 365 is probably a good idea, but Microsoft is missing one consumer product: a great cellphone running Windows and seamlessly working with other Windows devices. Having phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops all seamlessly working together is something that I now insist on. For now, this makes me an Apple customer because iPhone/iPad/MacBook devices work really well together. If Microsoft had a fantastic phone with handoff, they could compete better. (BTW, I briefly owned a Windows 10 laptop a few years ago - bought it just to play with Windows 10. I thought Windows 10 was quite good.)
Heck, you could even just use the phone's display as a keyboard / touchpad for the windows OS while displaying a desktop on the monitor.
BTW: I keep seeing people talk about this hybrid concept but I have yet to see a UI toolkit that trivially scales up and down between phone/desktop. It mostly seems to involve a lot of compromises and a lot of extra work.
The problem is that there is no phone with an i7, 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD now. That's my laptop. My phone is a sub 5" Xperia X Compact. 3GB, 32 GB storage, a Snapdragon 600 something. Fast but not suited for the job I'm doing on the laptop.
Then the battery. It would drain as fast as the one of those old laptops that need to have theirs replaced.
We're still not there and I not sure there is a market for that. Maybe we'll get there by inertia once batteries and cycles per Watt will allow it. The direction we are headed now for this use case is the phone CPU driving a smart terminal to a powerful remote computer, with attached monitor and input peripheral.
An alternative to docking station: these AR screens and keyboards from the Dennou Coil scifi anime https://mengle.wordpress.com/tag/dennou-coil/ Kind of Google Glasses required.
Except I don't care about desktopified android/iOS/windows phone apps. All I want is to run my already existing open source desktop linux applications. Chroot on android doesn't have hardware acceleration and you have to use VNC for anything graphical.
Note that the Lumia 950 with the current production of Continuum is effectively a technology demo of that model since it doesn't have x86 emulation [2] and therefore can't run the full breadth of Windows applications. That said, Continuum already does use the Phone's display as a keyboard, mouse, or just a second display according to your preference.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNxtMtlrm6U
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2y1cKh-KXs
They tried and failed, very little chance they will try another shot at this, their brand is not associated with quality phones and it will be extremely hard to get developers to work on apps because they will believe the platform will be abandoned.
Still couldn't be bothered.
It's no better than markdown with pandoc (worse in fact, at least with pandoc you can use "$" and have latex do it.)
> With Build 16251, we are introducing the first set of features that enable “linking” your phone to your PC. This build’s scenario is focused on cross-device web-browsing. Today, we’re asking for you Windows Insiders to help us test this experience out using your Android phones. Support for iPhone is coming very soon, stay tuned.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/26/annou...
Also still updating and advancing Win10 Mobile; though obviously not making any devices.
I think the cheapest version is $70 a year. I'm still using office 2007 which cost about the same but has lasted 10 years. I dont think this software rental trend is anything about great value.
For a document editor or spreadsheet, continuous or even regular updates aren't important as long as it has the base features you need.
When you have a CRM that integrates with other systems, an accounting package that has to stay up to date with policies and laws, or even an IDE that can support numerous languages, regular updates are more valuable and in some cases necessary.
I used Office 2000 until I decommissioned my last Windows machine (dual boot even then) in 2010/11.
As a solution, I just set up a copy of Server 2016 Essentials, set the telemetry mode to "security" (which is easier said than done -- you have to go through an active directory server!) and installed Office 2016 Home + Student on it.
The lowest price for that Office SKU is $75 on Amazon at the moment, but normal retail is about twice that. It looks like they support current office releases for about 4 years, so I figure $40/year if I stay on the upgrade train and pay full price.
Server 2016 security updates end in 2026, and it retails for $400, so another $40/yr.
This all goes in a VM running on a low wattage (already always on) box, so it will hopefully update + reboot itself when I'm not around. Time will tell.
Electricity for my physical desktops running windows was $10's per month (windows refused to stay suspended...), and my incremental hardware costs are $0, so this is a lot less expensive than it looks.
Plus, this gets rid of the vast majority of the Win 10 spyware in a supported way, and future proofs against most hardware compatibility problems.
MS fanboy remark seems weird. I'm guessing you'll just think I'm an MS fanboy. Which would be silly, I use Apple products far more among other companies. OneDrive might actually be the only Microsoft app I use consistently.
Normal OneDrive which is what comes with the $80/year/5 people Office 365 isn't perfect. A few issues/features that they should have finished by now, but I'd be really surprised if regular OneDrive was causing those amt of issues.
I have had over 500GB syncing on OneDrive before via an office 365 account. It was fine. It would crash or mess up a lot more in early 2016 and 2015. But has been pretty good in the past year.
OneDrive still has issues though.
It doesn't understand symlinks and it doesn't allow far too many special characters in file names.
5 TB of OneDrive storage too.
Look. No referral or anything - https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-1-year-subscription-...
Great deal.
equivalent office 2007 for 5 family members is like $750? That's 10 years of 365, with no feature update (if you like that sort of thing) and no onedrive.
Is there any app that you use that wouldn't be covered by Office 365 Home edition?
Good strategy in theory, but looking at the Windows Store today, it seems like developers are not that interested in UWP and frankly, who can blame them?
If you want to write a tablet app, you target the iPad because it's the best product in that category. If you want to write a phone app, you target Android and iOS because that's where the money is today.
Is there good money to be made writing UWP at the moment? In my opinion, UWP apps on desktop are inferior to "classic" Windows apps. Windows 10 Mobile is pretty much dead at this point, so what's the point of UWP, what's the true benefit?
Only time will tell how effective this strategy is. I for one would love for this to succeed if it means better security for users (especially on older, technologically challenged folks)
Also, Edge only have a handful of extensions. If they want to compete against Chrome, they have to do something about that, otherwise people will just use Chromebooks.
The problem is that right now, doing UWP means no Win7 support, and that's a far larger segment - there are twice as many Win7 installs as there are all Win10 installs, and Win10 tablets would be positively minuscule in comparison. So this will change if and when Win10 becomes the dominant Windows desktop OS.
But we all know how users and many devs, actually value security.
Currently the only device shipping with 10S is the Surface Laptop, and it can be upgraded to regular Windows 10 Pro for free for the rest of the year. I suspect that step 1 of the Surface Laptop setup experience for users-in-the-know will be to do this upgrade, just like "uninstall craplets" has been for previous Windows laptops.
As consequence of the traditional WinDev vs DevTools relationship, WinRT did not care for a good story.
Worse, it forced devs to write the app three times because the APIs were not the same between phone, tablet and desktop.
Window 8.1, helped a bit with the Universal Apps model. Then the business code could be shared between platforms, but the views (XAML) still needed to be written three times.
Finally UWP was supposed to be back into one single code base for all platforms, but it still lacks polish.
One area is that .NET Native imposes restrictions on .NET code and they are still improving on that area.
Another burning point was that they dropped raw 2D APIs from .NET, forcing anyone that wanted accelerated graphics to go write DirectX code with C++/CX or C++/WRL. Forcing them to make Win2D available.
This is also one of the reasons why Visual Layer was later introduced.
C++ devs also don't know much what to expect.
Initially there was C++/CX and C++/WRL, then Kenny Kerr got hired to work on C++/WinRT, which would support UWP but with standard C++ instead of the extensions used by the former.
C++/WinRT is still WIP after two years, and C++ almost vanished from Microsoft UWP related presentations. The majority of C++ talks are always related to standards support, or OS X/Linux/Android related tooling support.
No word when C++/WinRT will reach feature parity with C++/CX, be supported on Blend or even actually integrated into Visual Studio.
Meanwhile HoloLens and Visual Layer graphical coding presentations are done with C#.
A real pity, because UWP is what I wish .NET would have been since version 1.0 built on COM and AOT compiled to native code, but Microsoft doesn't seem to get it right how to send an uniform message to the developers to build up confidence.
All these changes had their reasoned explanations back in the day: the install base was small so it didn't have much impact and they were removing cruft each time, but with hindsight it was a really bad way to go about creating a healthy ecosystem.
I have no interest in dockable phones or app handoff or any of that; never saw the point of it when using iOS + OS X, don't miss it now that I'm on Windows/Linux/Android.
(Currently dealing with Onedrive sync having self-destructed on her laptop, she is now much less of a Microsoft fan)
> Having phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops all seamlessly working together is something that I now insist on.
Yes, this is the problem Microsoft needs to focus on. 'A great cell phone running Windows' solves a problem for Microsoft. It's a self-centric view. Microsoft could make everything run seamlessly if they focused on that, instead of Windows on everything and walled gardens.
Would be interested in seeing companies that similar to IBM as Ben mentions, kept similar assets, but built new business models around them to accommodate a changing marketplace.
"Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is a comprehensive, general-purpose programming system which is being developed as a research project. The initial Multics system will be implemented on the GE 645 computer. One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility. Such systems must run continuously and reliably 7 days a week, 24 hours a day in a way similar to telephone or power systems, and must be capable of meeting wide service demands: from multiple man-machine interaction to the sequential processing of absentee-user jobs; from the use of the system with dedicated languages and subsystems to the programming of the system itself; and from centralized bulk card, tape, and printer facilities to remotely located terminals. Such information processing and communication systems are believed to be essential for the future growth of computer use in business, in industry, in government and in scientific laboratories as well as stimulating applications which would be otherwise undone."
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf
Industry and academia were pretty terrible about giving the navigational people credit, or even citing/preserving their work (try getting a copy of a paper from the CODASYL proceedings to see what I mean).
Gray strongly disapproved of all that, so I doubt he would want credit for the previous generation's contributions.
Anyway, the old hierarchical/navigational/codasyl stuff was mostly forgotten, then reinvented (poorly, at first) as key value stores turned into document databases, etc.
Something similar happened with containers, etc. I think the end product of the current generation will surpass the old stuff in most ways, but it is painful to know the history and watch train wrecks of obvious implementation mistakes.
https://vimeo.com/71278954
Open Source typically requires people to manage everything themselves, including update.
For those who see IT as cost-center/necessary evil, they want to have as less investment and as short-term as possible.
If this is the product of UX designers then I'm glad the OSS world doesn't have any.
I'd say there has been a renaissance of of VPS hosting, with DigitalOcean/Vultr and other providers offering a modernized UI, fast service, decent APIs, a few extra services, etc.
There is value in the simplicity of just getting root on a Linux box and setting up from there yourself.
New employer has dedicated machines on site which definitely helps.
Once I give the main system a kick it will scream on a few year old Xeon.
I've seen far too many 'shove everything on AWS' approaches fail to undertake it lightly.
I mean, I bet every government worker around the world needs a computer with an OS and an office suite. G7 countries could pool their resources together to hire engineers and designers and develop common solutions, like a FOSS alternative to Exchange, Windows and Office.
ReacOS would be a good start; it's already an open source clone of Windows.
Suggesting that we bury even more public funds into alternatives to Windows/Office is not helpful unless we can first devise a model that produces something better.
How is that efficient? What a waste of public funds.
What I am talking about is making ONE operating system for every level of governance. I'm talking about agreements by all party involved to pool their resources to make ONE OS, not 56.
The most popular desktop OS in the world is Windows. People are familiar with it and Win32 apps, so why not use ReactOS as a starting point?
That's exactly my point. Getting states to invest in free operating systems is not hard. But your proposal is only useful if it includes some way to get them to work together.
How are they supposed to fix the model they created?!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.microp...