[Sheflug] Windows future plans?

[John Southern <linuxtarragon@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I find myself unexpectedly off having failed to notice that it is a Bank
Holiday and in an attempt to not start hacking the overgrowth in the garden
I decided to catch up on some reading (although again nothing I am meant to
be reading).
I am in the fortunate position that I do not run Microsoft Windows. I do
not know how many machines we have in the house, but they are mostly Linux
with a small amount of Aix, Solaris, HPUX. MacOS and many 8-bit OSes. Even
the children all run Linux.
The only issue is it means I cannot compare as I am unaware of the pros and
cons of Microsoft.
Looking forward to where Microsoft is planning to go, my reading indicated
they seem to have two future aims.
This is all for their UWP-First plan which eventually I found means
Universal Windows Platform First. I assume that is to try and head off
Android and Steam.

CoreOS
I think they have now shelved this as being too hard. Rebuild Windows from
the ground up that would still run on standard PCs. To be honest, I thought
they had redone all the code when they brought out Windows for ARM in their
Windows RT version which I believe was Windows 8.1 some ten years ago.
Apparently the code was still a mess, so CoreOS was planned. This is partly
because old versions are either out of support or are rapidly heading that
way and they need a product to start people migrating to given that the
current Windows 11 has tough minimum hardware requirements.
Windows 10 is due to reach End Of Life on 14th October 2025 and Windows 11
a year earlier.

CorePC
The aim is the same, but going from the opposite way. Take Windows 10 and
remove as much as possible. They then intend to run this as a State
Separated machine where the core lives as a locked partition that a user
has no access to, similar to Android or the iPadOS.
They have not mentioned immutability yet, but I guess they plan on that. I
think they see Chromebooks as a major competitor due to the fact that
Chromebooks are cheap and likely to really split the market more. A new
Chromebook starts around £200 whereas a cheap laptop is £300 and a gaming
machine seems to be £600+

That sort of points to a future where you buy a cheap Chromebook equivalent
so you can browse and use web apps or you double your spend to be able to
run what you want or double again to play games and be a power user.
They also have Linux apps running due to their Windows Subsystem for Linux
and Android apps with their ProjectLatte (re-coding of Project Astoria).
I suppose my nightmare objection is we know that everything has
vulnerabilities. If you cannot access the core state machine, but some bad
actor does, you lose everything. If Microsoft has a way in then in theory
so do the bad people.

The second aim is they are also focusing on AI as the Bing division bought
Chatgpt. Unfortunately I remember Clippy. I have tried both ChatGPT and
Google's Bard and while they are capable of starting a project, they suffer
in that they are based on pulling out similar things. That  is OK if the
world is Cookie Cutter based but you generally need something new otherwise
everything, everywhere is the same. It also requires you to be very
specific in your questions. I am assuming that they are at least locale
sensitive so if I asked for music it would take me to popular UK songs
while someone in say Indonesia would get their appropriate tunes. That does
lead to the worry of how filtered we would become. Imagine living somewhere
with a very conservative government and so your world viewpoint from the AI
is tailored to popular posts from that region or even alternatives are
banned automatically. It does not matter which political persuasion you
consider, there are examples for all (China, North Korea, Russia, Turkey,
Iran, Afghanistan, USA for Florida or Texas, Bahrain, Sudan, Egypt, Syria,
Myanmar, etc)

Is that a reasonable summary or have I missed something of their plans?

Regards
John
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