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Silhouettetoday at 12:17 PM0 repliesview on HN

In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.

Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.

For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.