I was at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond a week before the Build developer conference, and I wanted to know what was going on with Windows after a reorg split the team into different divisions. Was Microsoft really preparing itself for a world without Windows? Nadella was ready to tell me that Windows isn’t going away – of course Windows isn’t going away – but he also wanted to explain his latest buzzwordy vision for the future of the Microsoft: AI, Intelligent Cloud, and Intelligent Edge.
Windows might still be here, but after talking to Nadella, I did get the sense that Windows is no longer as central to the company’s future plans as it once was. Instead of trying to make everything run on Windows (as his predecessor Steve Ballmer was trying to do), Nadella wants to ensure that everything can work with Windows.
The decline of Windows is definitely overblown in the media, but Microsoft did miss the next big thing by a thousand miles, and mindshare-wise, this has had enormous consequences. It hasn’t hurt Microsoft much financially though, and you can be sure Windows isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/the-associated-press-microsoft-windo…
Microsoft is likely to be still around even if Windows completely dies off.
The revenue of Windows is showing a decline but the sales of Office365 are up. What going on in Android has in some businesses displaced where staff would have a PC also it has displaced in some homes where they would have a PC.
Future threats:
Competition against windows is getting better. Google is talking about adding desktop Linux applications to chromebooks inside containers. Result chromebooks will be able to take a larger marketshare.
Next flatpak and snap on Linux is starting to get shorted out. This is kind of a solution to dependency hell so that people can install newer versions of applications without risking breaking their complete systems under Linux.
Microsoft Products lacking useful new features. This is a form of stagnation. Stagnation of a products make it more possible for open source clones to catch up on the wanted features.
Plus linux used in windows azure AI instead of win 10
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/microsoft-to-provide-fpga-accelerated…
Alfman will like this; it’s always FPGAs, even if from MS… ;P
You are wrong and it is too simplicistic to say “Microsoft Products lacking useful new features”. Are you speaking of Windows 3.11??
Fanboy alert!
No, he’s speaking about the atrocious Windows 10.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_…
Its is not in fact wrong. Be it Microsoft Office, SQL server…. The number of new features being added to Microsoft products is declining. This could be that Microsoft has hit feature saturation point.
They are lacking in numbers of new features that use to be added. Even 2010 to 2013 MS Office vs MS Office 2013 to 2016 you see decline. Also you are seeing increased rates of removing old features.
Operating system without useful applications is a useless. So Windows OS long term life depends on the pool of applications it has. So when Microsoft own applications are dropping you have to ask where this is going.
I don’t see how linking to an arbitrary Wikipedia article is gonna prove any point. We can see that any of the listed applications — even non-MS ones — are missing a hefty amount of “features”. (Not everything on the list is worth implementing anyway.)
Especially the Office suite is evolving and, I think, Microsoft currently has three competing branches of code for the same suite of apps. (Classic Office, Metro port of it, web apps that run in a browser.) Of course this leads to slower adoption of new features, and especially it leads to catching up between the three.
Edited 2018-05-08 06:49 UTC
I guess, there is an asymptotic limit on the number of features you can shove on any application that would be really useful instead of only bloating the whole thing. Of course, it varies with the type of data the application deals with but it is probably there. On MS Office and MS SQL cases, I presume they already hit it with every post 2010 version and, as stated, it does open the opportunity to challengers to catch up.
For my part, I would leave MS entirely behind if it was not for Autocad.
I really dislike what MS did to Windows on versions post 7, though Windows 10 corrected some of the annoyances (but not all of them).
Anyway, I don’t see any danger for Microsoft of loss of their dominance on desktop OS on current standing, specially after they wisely chose to embrace some of the competition tech and even helps improve them. What is happening, though, is that desktop OS already lost their status as the main computing device for most people. Things can go south, though, if smartphones get so powerful that most of us may only need keyboard, mouse and monitor to attach to them and have our demands fulfilled. Microsoft, of course, already planted their strategy for this case and I suspect this is what is behind their actions toward competitors.
What you have missed there is Chromebooks running Android and Linux applications. Google is going to provide a non developer mode for running Linux Desktop applications on Chromebooks this year. So you will have a device with keyboard, mouse and bigger monitor that people will not have to change the OS in the common market. Phones have done so much damage to Microsoft market. Next question is how much damage can a more functional Chromebook do.
Laptop form of a Chromebook can generate more heat than a Phone due to larger cooling area.
Windows isn’t going away on the desktop, because Wine still doesn’t offer a great out of the box experience for running games. The competition is mostly coming from mobile/consoles. People that never really used/wanted a PC for anything other than work have already moved to alternatives, and if they never bothered learning photoshop/3D Studio Max/Autocad/etc they never had a reason to be locked to the platform.
Laptops/ultra books are killing off the notion of a home PC. Most people aren’t getting into computing at home from a content creation point of view and just have no need for a heavy duty machine. Ask yourself how often you opened the GIMP or 3D Studio Max, versus your web browser/facebook/gmail? The ratio would be 99:1 against the heavy tools for myself, and I love modding games. The reality is 99% of computing is reading news, communicating with friends and watching movies/listening to music. Most homes have a PS4 or Xbox One for gaming now.
Edited 2018-05-09 00:46 UTC
Really you need to be watching the percentages of games being release on steam and other platforms for Linux. The percentage of the yearly releases to support Linux out box is increasing. This is not using wine this is native Linux games. So depending on the games you play there may be no reason to be on Windows because of games you play might be Linux native.
3D Studio Max and Autocad are are from Autodesk do remember Maya that is Linux platform supporting is also from Autodesk. 3d animation has strong competition from Blender so Autodesk had to make Maya cross platform to be competitive.
So as the feature difference between open source and closed source reduce pressure to match the platform support comes into play.
Things are changing if you are paying attention.
Their sales are in the range of 100 or 200 million, that’s significantly less than “most homes” on this planet, or even among the developed nations…
Edited 2018-05-10 19:44 UTC
Wikipedia? Where? I don’t see Wikipedia. His link leads to the wiki of The Document Foundation.
Isn’t that about the last time they did add valuable new features?
I would hand that to them up to XP. Then it went actually downhill. With all the .NET and XAML crap in the OS, and then those tiles…
It is more than products lacking new features.
IMHO, it is more like products with features that 90%+ of users will never use.
I’m sure that if MS was to take the Office 2003 codebase and fix all the security issues and make it 64bit but leave out the ribbon, it would sell well especially if it was truly multi-platform and not cloud based.
Of course I am dreaming.
MS seems to be becoming more and more irrelevant to the mainstream users. These are the ones using IOS and Android for pretty well everything.
That means that the traditional market for MS products is getting marginalised outside of businesses but even there we are seeing large companies allowing MacOS etc.
So what are they going to do to become relevant again?
Watch this space (with varing degrees of success)
They better not miss the IoT boat, as they did with mobile. Because if they do they’re toast. Sure, they’re doing great as a company, especially financially. But they’re no longer a consumer tech company and their fanboys are still in denial.
They’ve already missed the IoT boat.