Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? - eviltoast
  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Microsoft makes its money with Azure and M365 licenses for enterprise customers now.
    Windows as a consumer operating system is a loss leader. The only reason it still exists is to breed familiarity with the MS ecosystem in all future employees.
    This strategy works until a certain amount of really big businesses do the math and find out how many millions they can save each month by throwing their weight behind a Linux-based solution. Luckily for Microsoft, most CEOs and CTOs of these major corporations are forced by the shareholders to prioritize short term profit.
    Rebuilding your infra and retraining your entire staff on a new ecosystem would be really expensive in the short term, even if it pays off in 5-10 years. And a high one-time cost is always harder to justify than a monthly amount that’s already budgeted into your operating costs and product prices.
    So it’s still safer to stick to what you know, for now.

    By the way, MS hasn’t been fighting against Linux for a long time.
    They’re among the top contributers to the kernel, integrated Linux into Windows as a subsystem, run their own Azure backend on Linux servers, and post help articles on how to install Linux.