Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore

So move the desktop over to Linux or BSD. Add a nice Windows GUI to make the change visually less noticable, and have a rosetta-like functionality that makes old apps work seamlessly. First steps: make an Office version for Linux, and make Adobe do the same with CS. Everybody will follow.<p>In fact it&#x27;s turning the current situation with the Ubuntu subsystem around. Make Ubuntu the main system, and Windows a VM like service. Maybe that&#x27;s the whole idea behind this. It would show vision.

The title is too strong, while the message of the piece is more subtle: Microsoft no longer has the Windows-or-bust strategy. Their goal used to be to fight to be <i>the</i> computing platform. Windows is still <i>important</i>, but they&#x27;re no longer insisting that it be the foundation of their strategy, which means they&#x27;re no longer insisting that the world run Windows in all the things. They&#x27;re conceding ground in one area, so they can flourish in others.

The Win32 API and DirectX are of vital importance to me. But hey, if you think Windows is not important anymore, why don&#x27;t you just release the source code, or start cooperating with Wine&#x2F;ReactOS?

Wonder if that would be because computers are not that important any more because they are no longer &quot;personal computers&quot; personal computers are now phones. desktops&#x2F;laptops ... previous generation of compute devices live on primarily as a means to connect to other companies computers that are typically running other OSs which also does not matter.<p>Much as I may prefer a compute environment where OS choice was meaningful we are a tiny minority and will have to adapt to a world with less choice because it makes no sense to put effort into something that does not matter.

The article seems to be saying that the OS won&#x27;t be as big of a focus because they want to move everything to the cloud? The headline seems a bit click-baity but the article isn&#x27;t much better.

Well, unless somebody is going to invest billions of man-hours in porting close to thirty years of legacy code, it certainly is.<p>Or massively invest in Wine so that all that legacy code can run seamlessly on Linux.<p>Time after time they get all hot and bothered about their new platform, whip up a lot of FUD, and then it flops, and we&#x27;re all still sitting here working off of Win32 apps.

This is a dishonest article with a misleading, attention-grabbing, clickbait-worthy headline, and is no different to other reporting recently (e.g. Stallman) where quotes are taken out of context and misrepresented into something completely different to fit the writer&#x27;s narrative.<p>I&#x27;m 100% sure that if you asked the Microsoft CEO if Windows is important, he will confirm that it is in fact important to Microsoft. The headline &quot;Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore&quot; is extrapolated from a quote of Nadella&#x27;s where he is discussing the new Neo and Duo devices. Read in the original context you can see that at no point does he say that Windows is not important to Microsoft, he is just giving some justification for not wanting to revive the Windows Mobile OS.

The first sentence in the article is this:<p>&gt; “The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us,” was the message from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella yesterday.<p>But I can&#x27;t tell if he actually said those exact words, or if that was the message that The Verge writers interpreted him as saying. If he didn&#x27;t say those exact words, it&#x27;s a bit dishonest for The Verge to lead with that sentence, in quotes, as if he&#x27;s quoted as saying that.

Does that mean I can get one of those new surface laptops and run linux on it? IIRC the first gen version had some issues with the keyboard.

And the OS isn&#x27;t important to Apple either.