My prediction, that my IT department hates to hear, is that Windows is going away.
Microsoft doesn't want to be Microsoft anymore; it wants to be Oracle and IBM and primarily make money off of business consulting and the cloud.
I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux, similar to the way macOS became Unix, but even less different than its underlying OS.
However, it should be noted that I'm not very good at predicting things.
> I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux.
I think this is unlikely. In many ways the NT kernel is superior to the Linux kernel. I just wish it were open source and didn't have the rest of windows around it.
Since when has technical superiority ever determined which product wins in the marketplace?
The Linux kernel is ubiquitous and free-as-in-beer, so it might win out. Android has already shown how you can build a proprietary userland on top of it.
Very unlikely, as it would mess with backwards compatibility and cause unhappiness of users and IT departments. Microsoft still makes money selling Office and other products there.
Microsoft doesn't need to care about backwards compatibility anymore, now that Wine exists precisely to have compatibility with Windows software (including software that even modern Windows itself no longer wants to run).
Hasn't Wine been good enough for at least 10+ years? Furthermore, how does being backed by Valve actually be of any significant value? I've heard of this argument for a couple of years now and I'm still not convinced (not that I follow Wine development that closely).
> Hasn't Wine been good enough for at least 10+ years?
Depends on what you mean by "good enough". Wine is an incredible project that has achieved amazing successes, but it still falls short in a lot of ways.
I personally don't use Wine but I've encountered people online in the last 10+ years that use the argument that it's "good enough" for people to fully switch to Linux. Realistically, I don't think Wine actually convinced more than a handful of users to abandon Windows
If Windows goes away, personal computing basically dies with it. Everything will be locked-down walled-garden webshit, or community-built-jank FOSS desktops that really want to be like the locked-down walled-gaden webshit experience but will say it is for the user's own good.
Microsoft doesn't want to be Microsoft anymore; it wants to be Oracle and IBM and primarily make money off of business consulting and the cloud.
I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux, similar to the way macOS became Unix, but even less different than its underlying OS.
However, it should be noted that I'm not very good at predicting things.