this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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I mean, they already lost the war to Linux on infrastructure, those are billions they never made. It's not unlikely for them to lose the desktop as well.
Not really. Almost every Windows-based organization over a certain number of employees will use some shape or form of Active Directory (whether on-prem or in Azure) and most likely also Office 365, which is corporate/enterprise infrastrucure that is really hard to migrate away from once you built your IT and processes around it.
All the license fees for just retaining access to and being able to onboard new employees in that infrastructure is a huge portion of the budget for these organizations.
They just gave up the war on competing with UNIX/Linux on the non-enterprise production infrastructure side, since there were no money to be made there.
Infrastructure meaning servers
I know what you mean, but it's not what you said. :-)
Just wanted to point out that they still have monopoly on the enterprise side of organization infrastructure, which is huge - the number of companies running production systems on self-hosted Linux infrastructure are orders of magnitude fewer than those that don't, even if the number of Windows servers in total might be fewer.
Microsoft gets paid per employee, per application suite and per cloud service (if Azure is involved for the AD) - not only per server. They were very early on the recurring subscription model almost every SaaS provider is leaning into nowadays, even for on-prem stuff.
I think pretty much everyone here knows that