[German]"I would have been fired for this tweet under Steve Ballmer" is the confession of a Microsoft product manager who uses a Mac with macOS for his work, but has a VM with Windows 11 running on it.
Advertising
Support for Windows 10 will end in the fall of 2025 – and Microsoft wants to force its customers onto Windows 11. However, this doesn't always work and there are currently an increasing number of "critical reports" about the Windows ecosystem and the operating system as such. One particular tidbit was recently published on Platform X.
The picture shows one of the women (could have been pop icon Kate Perry) who flew with a tourist women only mission (NS 31; consisting of six women) from Blue Origin on April 14, 2025 with the New Shephard space capsule at an altitude of approx. 100 km, experienced a few seconds of weightlessness and then landed on a parachute in the Texas desert. The lady kisses the Earth after her 10-minute short trip into near space and symbolically thanks the Earth for allowing her to return to the ground after the trip.
The tweet with the embedded photo can already be described as iconic. Merill Fernando writes: "Me going back to macOS after being forced to spend an hour on Windows" – as "Me, after returning to macOS after being forced to spend an hour on Windows".
It is important to note that the tweet, which was viewed by over 700,000 X users, was not posted by a no-name participant. Merill Fernando is a Product Manager at Microsoft and works as Principal Program Manager in the Microsoft Entra team. The attention the tweet generated surprised the man, as he wrote in a follow-up tweet.
Advertising
He was legally given a MacBook to work on by Microsoft (in many companies, employees can choose between Macs and Windows PCs). Another tweet shows his personal workstation, where the product manager's personal Mac Studio, several screens and a notebook can be seen.
Merill Fernando writes that he avoids doing personal things on his work laptop (the visible Macbook) and uses Mac Studio for his personal podcast, his newsletter and other open source projects. The man also develops apps and is active on the internet as a podcaster.
With the Windows app for macOS, he can connect remotely to the Microsoft DevBox and a Microsoft Surface Laptop. He also uses the Parallels virtualization product under macOS to run a number of VMs for testing applications. Parallels also runs a virtualized Windows.
The remarkable thing about the above tweet is the fact that Merill Fernando, as a Microsoft product manager, openly admits his dislike of Windows and prefers to work with macOS. German site Golem, which dug up the story a few days ago, quotes the Microsoft man as saying "If Ballmer was still CEO, I would have been fired for this tweet." My mother's saying comes to mind: "Children and fools tell the truth". But the world is too complex to boil everything down to this saying.
Advertising
