An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
The rumor that Microsoft is building a version of Windows 10 that can only install apps from the Windows Store has drawn criticism before it's even official. Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney took to Twitter to attack the operating system. Although its real name is named Windows 10 Cloud, he's dubbing it "Windows 10 Crush Steam Edition." Sweeney is convinced that Microsoft wants to exercise total control over the Windows platform and destroy Valve's Steam. Last year, Sweeney attacked the Universal Windows Platform API. He claimed (incorrectly) that third-party stores such as Steam would be unable to sell and distribute UWP games, leaving them at a disadvantage relative to Microsoft's own store. He followed this statement with the claim that Microsoft would systematically modify Windows so as to make Steam work worse and worse, such that gamers grow tired of it and switch to the Windows Store. In his tweets, Sweeney recognizes that Microsoft wants to compete with Chrome OS. But he fails to understand what the company must do to actually offer that competition. He wrote that "it's great for Microsoft to compete with ChromeOS, but NOT BY LOCKING OUT COMPETING WINDOWS SOFTWARE STORES." This statement represents a failure to understand that "locking out competing Windows software stores" is, for this market, positively desirable. It's fundamental to preventing the hard-to-support free-for-all that a Windows system would otherwise represent. A later tweet does recognize the value of this lockdown, but Sweeney says that Windows 10's "great admin features to limit user software installs" should be used instead. This again suggests a misunderstanding of the target market: systems will be used with little to no supervision and with little to no administrative oversight. To compete against the Chromebook, Windows 10 Cloud needs to be locked down by default, and it must not offer any ready way to disable that lockdown. In his complaints, Sweeney also fails to consider what happens should the Chromebook threat go unaddressed: Chromebooks running Chrome OS will proliferate. These machines will not support third-party stores, they will not support Steam, and they will not support PC games at all. Sweeney may not want Microsoft to build this world, but even if Microsoft doesn't create it, Google already is doing so.
Re: Meanwhile in the Apple ecosystem on iPads..
By ArmoredDragon
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2017-Feb-1 17:52
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
TFA is either biased or uninformed though; ChromeOS supports side loading and is open source, so there really isn't any reason why third party app stores couldn't be used.
Sweeney may be correct in that even if Microsoft allows side loading, they can revoke it at any time and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
And yes, this likewise would be more comparable to the Apple model. Arstechnica seems to routinely be biased against Google though, so it would make sense if they just wanted to pick on ChromeOS.
What kind of story...
By Notabadguy
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2017-Feb-1 17:53
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
What kind of hack news site PICKS UP AN UNFOUNDED RUMOR...then runs a story on the unfounded rumor just to discredit the author of the rumor based on previous rumors.
What..the fuck kind of news for nerds is this gossipy whining?
Re:Remember, kids
By PPH
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2017-Feb-1 17:57
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
"DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run."
It's been that way since the beginning. VCs (with the guts to risk pissing off the Monster from Redmond) would often ask a start-up what their contingency plans were in the event Microsoft would cripple their app. Or offer their own 'free' version bundled with the OS.
To be fair; this isn't about Microsoft killing Steam. It's probably more like selling it through the Windows Store. "You wanna do business in my town? You gotta give me a piece of da' action, see?"
You can install SteamOS on Chromebooks
By NotInHere
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2017-Feb-1 18:12
• Score: 3
• Thread
You can install Steam OS on Chromebooks, just as you can on Windows machines. Its just the game industry that needs to support Steam OS, and he isn't locked in to Microsoft any more. And no, he won't be locked into Steam OS either, because if they start demanding more, he can just clone Ubuntu himself and distribute his game as OS. As long as new computers will allow free OS choice, there is no problem.
Re: Meanwhile in the Apple ecosystem on iPads..
By ArmoredDragon
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2017-Feb-1 20:19
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
Except that Android is in practice as locked down as Windows is since nearly all apps require Google services and you can't re-compile Android with Google services including the store.
That doesn't seem to stop Amazon from running its own app store or distributing its own non-Google fork of Android.