Yes you can't get it legally as a regular end user but MSFT also doesn't care about piracy either. They don't lose money on you (they rather keep you as a Windows user than switch to another platform).
Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 is supported until 2032, Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 is supported until 2034.
That's why it's not mentioned, it's not a product for "normal users", the audience described in the post.
It's asinine. They could charge $1000+ for LTSC licenses, but my data and digital sovereignty is apparently worth even more to them.
See here (Enterprise and IoT Enterprise LTSB/LTSC editions):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...
This whole thing makes sense for indie devs or build VMs but breaks down for Enterprise pretty quick, and Microsoft is much more friendly to Enterprise customers than indie devs.
However, this is not what Microsoft wants or needs. Microsoft is doing just fine by providing businesses what they need: a platform that can be tightly controlled and is easy to administer for large user counts.
The fact that consumers use Windows is a nice side effect for keeping mind share and to get people familiar and preferring windows when they enter the workplace. That's it. It's an accidental userbase that exists to be exploited.
Microsoft's money comes from Azure & Office(365). If you're not spending millions on enterprise support/software assurance (or whatever they call it these days) contracts, you pretty much don't exist to them.
Microsoft's core product is minimizing operational risk, not the software itself. You can piece together your own stack using best of breed options, but you're going to pay double the price or more, and introduce a ton of friction and risk.
Some businesses (everyone outside of the SV tech echo chamber) "need" Microsoft because its risk mitigation, which is the highest technical feature a business can ask for. Backwards compatibility, EntraID is good, and the compliance/purview stack solves nearly all regulatory headaches OOTB.
OTOH yeah there's a bit of legacy entrenchment, both from Microsoft's monopolistic behavior but also because they were the only ones with an "IT In a box" solution for non-tech companies. Having a cohesive identity, security, and device management ecosystem that can scale to hundreds of thousands of endpoints with a few mouse clicks takes a lot of engineering effort that not many others were doing at the time.
How will MS PMs meet their quarterly targets without Windows phoning home every moment someone is using it? \s
Not quite sure about this. .NET is a superb platform, easy to write reasonably good code, huge standard library, well-maintained, many languages supporting a wide variety of paradigms (C#, VB, F#, PowerShell, C++). .NET is one of Microsoft's success stories.
If the argument is to try to prohibit it, then it just won't work as a platform, because too much existing software won't work on it. There's a lot of garbage I'd love to not have (all the stupid hardware config apps all the manufacturers push on you) but just having that functionality not work can't be the answer.
Similar pet peeve, and I think the solution to this is the platform setting, adopting, and enforcing conventions. Something like what has happened with notebook trackpads[1] about a decade ago, and more recently RGB peripherals[2]—no more cancerous giant Electron app to move a few sliders and set an RGB hex code.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/input-precis...
[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/xbox/gdk/docs/features/com...
That said, knowing Microsoft they WOULD release something like this but cripple it by doing something stupid like disallowing the use of virtualization technology, even as an installed package.
I disagree. .NET is fundamental to the Windows platform. It's like having a Python runtime installed by default in some Linux distros, which makes sense for that distribution's use-case.
The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs. Businesses pick them for employee computers for the same reason.
And Windows Server more or less became a moot point when the cloud took over. They don’t want you hosting your own Exchange server anymore, they want you in Office 365. And they’ll just as happily sell you Linux compute instances on Azure because lower COGS means more profit.
As a Microsoft sysadmin with a stable of homelab machines of all types and brands (and favorites that are definitely not Microsoft), enterprise mostly buys Microsoft because of the built in endpoint and end user management stacks.
And that's why the MacBook Neo exists now. Apple is coming for the lower-end market.
At that point the only thing keeping people on Windows is software lock-in. Which Valve is in the process of working towards dismantling for gaming at least.
The other important factor is that the share of PCs in general is a fraction of Android and iOS devices.
Ever since the MacBook Neo, that's no longer the case. And frankly... Apple has now demonstrated that an old iPhone SoC is enough to drive macOS. I think that it should be feasible for them to run macOS on iDevices as a hypervisor-style guest, yielding you the full macOS experience when plugged into an USB-C dock.
Fair point. But they are also showing people that you can have decent Apple performance at a price point previously reserved for budget Windows laptops.
> It is easier to administer too.
Meh, that's... not as clear as it used to be. Yes, in a full on corporate world based on on-prem AD, GPO and the rest of the MS architecture that might be the case, but even there, IT already has to support Macs because marketing/PR and IT usually demand macOS. And with Windows, it has always been a huge effort to keep up with MS and patchdays randomly breaking stuff. Apple is far more stable.
Budget Windows hardware is trash and the OS is so full of bloat that within a couple of years a budget Windows laptop will be barely functional. For a long time now arguably the only reason to go Windows is if you're a gamer or a business user with very specific software requirements.
But for a lot of people a Mac is still out of reach because they don’t actually have that much disposable cash on hand at any given moment. Which might not be how the situation has to be, strictly speaking, but I’m not here to bother them about their spending patterns.
Also for most people who don’t have the computing needs of your average Hacker News follower, Chromebooks might be the real elephant in the room. The Chromebook users in my life seem to have easily the fewest computer worries.
Looking from the outside, it doesn't seem that Microsoft treats Windows as an isolated product anymore with a balance sheet of sales versus development costs. Rather, it's an advertising billboard for their other money-making products like Edge, Copilot, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and at some point Candy Crush of all things(?). In fact this isn't isolated to just Windows or Microsoft either. SwiftKey pushes you to use OneDrive, Google (search engine) famously pushed Google products and there were antitrust discussions about that. Advertising was just some annoying thing that was necessary to power free web services but now it's infiltrated the very core of our day-to-day technology. Until we can get proper antitrust enforcement, we'll only see technological stagnation get worse as more products become boring billboard monopolies with little incentives to get better.
So, basically Linux with Wine/Proton?
Isn’t this basically what SteamOS does?