Ask Paul: January 26 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let's kick off the end of another busy and momentous week a bit early with another great set of diverse reader questions.
Windows vNext
wright_is asks:

Is there any news of when the next versions of Windows are due for release?

There's no literal news, but we know that there will be a major new release of the Windows client this year. There are questions about the timing---many are reporting that it will land earlier than usual instead of the usual September/October timeframe, but other reports disagree---and the name/brand. I suspect it was supposed to be called Windows 11, but Microsoft has reconsidered that given the renewed attention it's giving Windows 10 and because it would be confusing to customers.

Our supplier has said that now that Microsoft has dropped support for Windows 2019, we have to upgrade all of our 2019 servers by May and when we go to Server 2022, we will have to upgrade them again in 2026. We would like to go direct to 2025, if possible, as we don't want to go through the process of upgrading a whole farm of servers every 2 years!

(Yes, I know that Server 2019 gets support until 2028, but the supplier is only supporting versions of Windows under active support (new features), not long term support...

Windows Server is not really on my radar at this point, and I don't see any official roadmap or similar. Microsoft is obviously testing future versions through the Insider Program, and it's not surprisingly moving at a much slower pace than the client versions, based on what little I could find out in the world. The Tech Community site has a Windows Server Insiders blog that suggests the last build was in December 2023, and that was for the LTSC version. But mapping these things to traditional product versions is just as hard (impossible?) as it is for client, from what I can tell.

I can ask Mary Jo about this, but perhaps someone at Petri would have a better idea.

UPDATE: Mary Jo just tweeted about this, lol. --Paul
Epic v. Apple
jrzoomer asks:

Paul what do you think of the whole Apple vs Epic thing? Specifically the part where apparently Apple will now allow outside links for purchases--but Apple's new rule is that they will still charge developers a 27% fee to developers who now have to report to Apple. I think though it may be technically legal to do this, the phone is such a large and important market that there should be a set of rules or laws around this

I'm going to write about this separately, so let me just hit some high points here.

The two major App Stores charge unreasonably high fees, and they should be legally required to match the range that credit card processing services charge.

The "overhead" of the App Store is illusory as it is fully subsidized by Apple's unusually high (40-50 percent) margins on the iPhone, the best-selling phone in the world, and its other hardware.

Apple's security story is a fantasy: This happens entirely at the OS level, and ...