Doktor Avalanche
Their big ultimate plan though is one OS to rule them all

During the Ballmer years, they got stuck on the idea that people actually wanted their phone and desktop to behave the same.  Most people do NOT want that.  Under Nadella, they have been aggressively backpedaling from that nightmare.  They didn't go 180 degrees away from the mess that Ballmer's reign created, but at least they do seem to have some appreciation for the idea that people running big powerful multi-display workstations really aren't wanting to play with tiles and such.  They typically have mission critical software.  In our case, we are talking recording studio software.  But it could just as easily be architectural software, investment, or 1000 other specialty fields.  And you won't find most of that software on the "app store".
 
The other big change is that Microsoft really is making good income from teh Surface hardware.  They really got the tablet right with the Surface, IMHO.  Because of the hardware revenue, they aren't as focused on the OS revenue as a separate stream.  But I still say that a big part of the Windows 10 world will be "ancillary revenue streams".  So get ready to have your OS pitching at you 24 x 7.

I've been doing some interesting work recently doing sound effects for a company that makes slot machines. Not your grandaddy's slot machine, but big high-budget Las Vegas casino stuff. The machines are fairly astounding. Great speakers, great high-resolution touch-screens, just spectacular tech.

Anyway, even though I've done lots of work in games and software before, I've never encountered a less Windows-y environment. The machines themselves run a bespoke version of QNX, and all the dev work is done on Linux. They've had me in working on-site, and I needed a Windows machine, and they had to go out and buy one; literally not one single Windows laptop in the entire company.

I reckon that's Microsoft's worst nightmare, that kind of thing. And their best hold on the professional environment is, somewhat ironically, in keeping a hold on the home user environment. The fact that everyone knows Windows from childhood nowadays, might be the strongest factor preventing the more corporate world from abandoning it. Free Windows for the end user means Windows carries on being the de-facto OS for the greatest number of potential employees.
 

I should add that the Cakewalk subscription model is fundamentally different.  It isn't about treating the customer as an object from which to harvest ancillary income.  It is simply a proposition that we want the Sonar functionality and Cakewalk needs a reliable revenue stream in order to fund that development.  They were completely up-front about that deal.  I have no objections to that type of marketing.  I would suggest that we should expect Microsoft to be a lot less transparent in their Win10-based marketing moves.
 

cparmerlee
 
That doesn't mean that Win10 is a bad thing per se.  it just means that users must be very vigilant because their software suppliers may have interests directly opposed to the users' interests.

Any software supplier with interests opposed to its users will become completely irrelevant to them in short order. I find your characterization of any kind of monetization strategy as something users should be warned about and vigilant against as odd. We used to think it would be great if companies could write incredible software that they give away to everybody who wants to use it but we knew it would never happen because companies need to make  a lot of money to create something on the scale of Windows or Android or OSX. Companies have finally figured out a way to do it without imminent threat of bankruptcy and rather than celebrate such a thing, we are now warning people to watch out for the pig in the poke.
 
A huge trend for companies like Google, Apple and now Microsoft over the last decade or so has been the transformation of software from a cash driver to a commodity, much like music. Microsoft fought that trend tooth and nail for quite some time (and in some product lines is still fighting it) but the writing is on the wall for all to read. Expect more efforts to monetize user interaction, not less. I personally see the necessity for doing it and support it completely if it means continued innovation and improvement to the platform.

Don't get me started on Capitalism and globalism Not the right forum for that...

Sorry, I don't mean to be mashing anybody's hot buttons and I wasn't trying to start a political discussion. I was commenting on the pressures OS vendors are struggling with as they explore business models that work in an era of free or nearly free software. Google's very existence depends upon monetizing the entire user experience and the software they develop truly is what a previous poster seems to fear, a platform designed to exploit every conceivable  revenue opportunity that a user's attention span offers. If one considers that way of doing business as evil, Microsoft is a charming altar boy compared to the Borgia pope that is Google.
 
 
 

John T
I've been doing some interesting work recently doing sound effects for a company that makes slot machines. Not your grandaddy's slot machine, but big high-budget Las Vegas casino stuff. The machines are fairly astounding. Great speakers, great high-resolution touch-screens, just spectacular tech.

Anyway, even though I've done lots of work in games and software before, I've never encountered a less Windows-y environment. The machines themselves run a bespoke version of QNX, and all the dev work is done on Linux. They've had me in working on-site, and I needed a Windows machine, and they had to go out and buy one; literally not one single Windows laptop in the entire company.

I reckon that's Microsoft's worst nightmare, that kind of thing. And their best hold on the professional environment is, somewhat ironically, in keeping a hold on the home user environment. The fact that everyone knows Windows from childhood nowadays, might be the strongest factor preventing the more corporate world from abandoning it. Free Windows for the end user means Windows carries on being the de-facto OS for the greatest number of potential employees.
 

QNX is a specialized OS designed to support real time requirements which is not something Windows or OSX or even Linux does particularly well, and I can see it being a great choice for slot machine development. It's also a derivative of UNIX so using Linux as the development platform makes a lot of sense for them as well. MS offered Windows CE in that space and it was a pretty major player for awhile, but I'm not sure if CE is still offered.
 
If Windows continues to offer value it will do well. If it does not, things can change in the blink of an eye regardless of their current market share.

kevinwal
Sorry, I don't mean to be mashing anybody's hot buttons and I wasn't trying to start a political discussion. I was commenting on the pressures OS vendors are struggling with as they explore business models that work in an era of free or nearly free software. 

 
I wasn't commenting about you, I was commenting about myself... must resist the temptation  Must resist...  "Starbucks are ...."... OK I have to leave the room now....

SilkTone
Right now it is impossible to get low latency on WinRT (aka "modern"/Metro/toy apps) since they have removed all audio APIs that had any chance if giving you low latency, and only left shared mode WASAPI. Meaning a 160 ms round trip latency at best. I was in the process of porting a real app to a "modern" app and gave up once I realized this.
 
And people wonder why there are no "modern" quality audio apps in the Windows Store.

Actually, for Windows 10, they enabled the real time Audio APIs on all the platforms including phone, Windows Store, etc... Microsoft has a whole team working on Pro Audio now for the audio part. They are not a joke and seem to be testing all kinds of pro audio equipment...

CadErik
Actually, for Windows 10, they enabled the real time Audio APIs on all the platforms including phone, Windows Store, etc... Microsoft has a whole team working on Pro Audio now for the audio part. They are not a joke and seem to be testing all kinds of pro audio equipment...

That's good to know.  Part of this falls into the category of improving Windows to serve as a real-time OS as opposed to a basic multi-tasking OS.  I have a colleague from the days when we both worked in a mainframe company.  One of his specialties was the optimization of hardware, firmware and OS code to allow very efficient CPU dispatching that is necessary for real-time systems (distinct from transactional systems).  When the mainframe era started to wind down, my colleague went to work for Microsoft, and I believe he has been working on similar projects there.
 
The nature of the beast is that you have to think at the microsecond or nanosecond level, and you must have an understanding of how the instruction pipelines and multi-level memory caches respond to rapid context switches.  Believe it or not, these are things that neither the hardware engineers nor the OS developers intuitively understand in most cases.  Because of that, the process is more complicated than changing a few lines of code here and there.  One essentially has to be an evangelist, and these "religious conversions" may take several generations of hardware and software to be fully realized.  He's been working on this a long time.  There is no question that Windows SERVER has made great strides in this area, and that was his primary concentration early on.  But I expect Microsoft is extending that evolution to the consumer-level products now.