My colleague Pablinux is upset with some practices of Satya Nadella's company and wrote about the topic in Linux Addicts. In this post I am going to explain why Microsoft does what it does.
This is not a defense of Microsoft, but an explanation. In addition to the technology itself, I am passionate about the market movements of the companies behind it and have written some articles on Linux Addicts on the subject.
Pablinux's article
In his article, Pablinux begins by talking about something that I I commented also on this blog. The controversial feature of tracking user activity that excuses the user from being able to recover it and work with it using Artificial Intelligence in local mode. An important point that I will talk about later is that this feature will only be available for certain types of hardware.
However, the substance of the article is something else. The message that, according to the Windows Latest portal, Windows 10 users are receiving. I quote Pablinux's translation:
We want to thank you for your loyalty as a Windows 10 customer. As Windows 10 end of support approaches, we're here to support you on your PC journey.
Your PC is not eligible to upgrade to Windows 11, but will continue to receive Windows 10 fixes and security patches until support ends on October 14, 2025.
This is my colleague's reflection on the subject:
Annoying messages are just that, annoying, but you can live with them. What I think is going too far is sending those messages to unsupported computers inviting users to change PCs. Something never seen. Not even Apple has come this far, since when it decides to abandon a system it continues to release patches for years, and in the end it leaves us alone. I don't think it's the best either, but Microsoft's thing goes beyond dark brown.
Why Microsoft does what it does
Ray Norda was the founder of Novell. Novell, in addition to being for a long time the company responsible for the SUSE Linux distribution and the OpenOffice Go office suite (The improved version of OpenOffice that most Linux distributions came with) It was the first company to have agreements with Microsoft to include its technologies in Linux distributions.
We owe it to Norda to coin the term Co-opetition.
In their book Co-opetition, authors Brandenburger and Nalebuff explain that co-competition is a model by which All actors in a market (competing companies, suppliers, customers and regulators) compete to have a better position but collaborate to develop a market. The framework of this collaboration can occur in the following areas:
- Developments of common standards.
- Investigation and development.
- Expansion of new markets.
A classic Co-opetition relationship is the one that exists between hardware manufacturers and operating system developers. Given that computer purchasing users have a limited amount of money to invest, a first competition would be who gets a larger portion of the pie. That is, the cost that the user is willing to pay for a new computer.
But, on the other hand, You cannot sell a new operating system to someone who is already satisfied with the one they use. And, new features cannot be added to software if there is no hardware capable of supporting it.
This is where cooperation between hardware and software manufacturers comes in. Given the Microsoft lost a lot of market in its late and failed commitment to mobile devices, it needs a new market niche in which to lead and it found it in Artificial Intelligence.
For its part, Nvidia, AMD and Snapdragon need a mass market in which to sell their new models of microprocessors and graphics cards.
And that, friends, is why Windows 10 ends its support next year and Microsoft invites us to buy a new computer.