As the world outside increasingly turns into a social and ecological hellscape, people will want to look at it less and less, and the time spent peering through windows will diminish. Eventually, the existence of a portal to a realm outside their bleak cave will be forgotten to time and memory, leaving behind only pale indoor light and stale indoor air.
That’s what the room sprays are for.
Trying to turn every computer into just a dummy terminal that accesses a cloud server, rather than using the local resources
More forced AI, more integrated cloud services, more failed patches causing data loss.
Oh, you meant the future and not this year so far? My bad.
Drink an activation soda to continue booting.
Microsoft pushes cloud and AI with increasingly negative side-effects. Eventually, EU regulation steps in to require offline-capable OS with fair and obvious choice. Microsoft tries to argue security, but ultimately fails.
Microsoft continues to push and connect their services as one, with synergy effects. Eventually EU regulation and prosecution steps in, requiring a neutral OS that must not pre-install software or point to other products in OS settings and apps, etc. Integrations must be openly standardized first, before implementing their own.
Despite all this, and despite a move from EU and EU-national institutions to sovereignty through shared open source solutions, Microsoft retains their strong/prevalent market position because the market as a whole is not as strategic and concerned, and Microsoft products like office, onedrive, Teams, and their other business software and services remain a predominant and grab-first choice, and the security promise of big enterprise software, battle-tested, with strong established auth etc remains a big selling point for them.
It’ll lose a lot of relevance. Casual users will move to smartphones and tablets, more experienced ones will move to Linux, and Linux gatekeepers will move to “the next big thing” once they no longer can control the user experience of others (just because a developer doesn’t use Neovim and Hyperland, does not mean they’re a fake developer).
People in large will keep using it because they’ve no clue what a computer is. They just recognise symbols and which order to click them.
The product keeps on getting worse.
People will get angry and look for political “solutions” to their own unwillingness to learn.
As a result all of networking and computing will be made worse, with lots of red tape, solidifying an oligarchy, penalizing the alternatives.
Just like how there were 1000s of car makers in the 20th century, but now only a handfull. Legislating cars to be shitty DRM-ed smartphones on wheels.
enshittification
Well, the future is here now.
Things can always be shittier…
Cloud. Windows is going to be sold as remotely accessible virtual machine hosted on Azure. The change will first take place in government offices, then in companies, and finally (after people get used to it at work) among consumers.
Why would gov and enterprise like it? Because of:
- safety - all enterprise data will be stored on Azure servers and won’t ever leave it. It makes preventing data leakage so much easier
- maintenance - software updates can be applied even outside of working hours, Microsoft could launch VMs and update at any time
- ease of upgrade - need better specs? you don’t need to buy better hardware anymore, you just buy better subscription. Hardware won’t become obsolete anymore that quickly
Consumers will also like it. No need to pay hundreds of dollars for new GPU when you just want to play newly released game. Also, all your data accessible from anywhere in the world.
And why Microsoft would like it? Kinda obvious, it would be even harder for users to quit a subscription, they will be tied to ecosystem even more
Forget the cloud. What if the ad is the operating system? Windows 12 will be using a distributed architecture, running on top of global ad networks. Every advertisement medium (TV, radio, web, video) will include an x86 interpreter that runs Windows services (ARM support will come later).
The same tracking tech used to target you with that ad will be used to log you in to your Azure Copilot 365 OneDrive account, so you can access your files and applications seamlessly without having to remember a password or pin. When your smart toilet is showing you an ad for Draft Kings to earn your flush credit, you’ll be able to check your emails, connect with the fam, or ask Copilot for assistance.
I think it’s days in home computers are numbered.
Most of the things an average person needs can be done through the web browser. You only need a Chromebook, phone or tablet.
Linux has suddenly become a viable option for gaming. This has been the one thing that kept many away from using Linux.
I don’t really see why anyone would want to use Windows for their home PC, other than familiarity. It doesn’t offer anything you can’t find better elsewhere.
I think they’re going to need to back pedal some ideas. Ideas that are “for your benefit” such as, your user folder linked to one drive (so you’ll always have a backup) is also a cash-grab (“oh, you only have 5 GB of space. We’ll sell you more!”). This needs to be opt-in.
Windows 7’s market share has surprisingly increased to about 9.61% in 2025. This rise is likely due to users hesitating to upgrade to Windows 11 as support for Windows 10 is ending.
You can say that’s only 10%, but how much is that in lost revenue?
your user folder linked to one drive (so you’ll always have a backup) is also a cash-grab
That’s actually illegal bundling behavior, something they wouldn’t dare do if Biden was still president and Lina Khan was still head of the FTC.
I think actually that the future of Windows won’t be so dire post Trump. There’s no way the pro-monopoly brain rot survives this admin, and people will soon start to realize that the billionaires, although easy targets, are just a symptom of lax regulation rather than the root cause of the enshitiffication apocalypse of the mid 2020s.
Barebones OS with ads and a premium subscription for anything that makes it remotely useful
There have been multiple rumours of Windows 12 being basically EdgeOS and just a gateway to the web with all apps and compute in the cloud. Some articles I’ve read and videocasts I’ve watched say “Microsoft have realised it’s not about the hardware, but the software and selling subscriptions and services”. So, from my very limited and uneducated view, windows 12 would be the perfect vessel for doing just that. But they can only do it if there is good internet in the majority of the world, so my prediction is windows 12 will come in ~2032 or so.
Subscriptions. More cloud-based services. Office moving to an entirely web-based product. Continuing decline of whatever quality is left. Nadella is only interested in enterprise money like HP and IBM. Expect to see more abandonment of consumer-focused products, like Xbox.
If he had any balls, he’d split the company up, rather than letting so many products die on the vine.
