Windows is more or less over and MS has been gradually coming to terms with it, helped along by inflection points that made it painstakingly clear that the Windows way was beyond outmoded, like containers and cloud. I don't think MS is even pretending otherwise anymore.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to see MS give up on WSL, acquire CodeWeavers, and reimplement "Windows" as a proprietary desktop environment for a nix-ish OS with a super-souped-up WINE doing much of the legwork. At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).
Selling software, as a general business model, is on the ropes and this is a great indication of that. The victory of open-source here is both blatant and decisive.
Had it not been for every major software company deciding they can subsist on a combination of a) rental fees and b) advertising/demographic data, we'd probably have another RIAA v. The Internet-style showdown to confront over the next decade. In this respect, I suppose we should be grateful for the opportunity to pay 6x more to be in "the cloud".
As an observer, it's a weird situation to see, and still trying to orient my feelings and understand what to make of it.
I would be very surprised to see them take that reimplementation path as their backwards compatibility has been so important for decades (yes I know not everything runs still; but a large amount does). They have provided an evolutionary path and that would be revolution. The benefit to them seems likely to be outweighed by the disruption. And they know points of disruption are where they are more likely to lose customers.
> At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).
I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.
WINE runs most applications extremely well. With actual backing from a MegaCo, especially the MegaCo that owns all of the IP around Windows, I have no doubt that a year of work would round out the rough edges such that compatibility differences don't exceed what would be expected between major versions of Microsoft Windows.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to see MS give up on WSL, acquire CodeWeavers, and reimplement "Windows" as a proprietary desktop environment for a nix-ish OS with a super-souped-up WINE doing much of the legwork. At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).
Selling software, as a general business model, is on the ropes and this is a great indication of that. The victory of open-source here is both blatant and decisive.
Had it not been for every major software company deciding they can subsist on a combination of a) rental fees and b) advertising/demographic data, we'd probably have another RIAA v. The Internet-style showdown to confront over the next decade. In this respect, I suppose we should be grateful for the opportunity to pay 6x more to be in "the cloud".
As an observer, it's a weird situation to see, and still trying to orient my feelings and understand what to make of it.