Accurate as every other week's predicting of Microsoft's
impeding doom from users who don't like Windows in the past 30 years.
- 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft.
- 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft.
....
- 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft.
Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.
I don't think it's the same. I have been a Windows user all my life. Bloat and bad UX changes is one thing, but this is the first time I feel like I am having to actively fight the OS against showing me ads and dark practices like changing user preferences unbeknownst to me.
What problem? In 2013 Microsoft only had 2-3 big products, Windows, Office and X-Box. Now it's significantly more divested and the company's growth no longer depends on Windows' success or failure, and the stock pricing reflects that.
So, you're saying that losing 21% of their OS market share by actively pissing off their customers shouldn't be seen as a problem? OS stagnation would be an improvement compared to what they're currently doing.
Why is having even bigger market share so important? Android has bigger market share than iOS too yet iOS is the more profitable one. Microsoft cares about profit first, not unprofitable market share.
Not saying they're right or wrong, just saying it seems to be working for their bottom line as Windows is less relevante towards that as the PC market has been in a continuous decline anyway in the last decade.
Fighting to capture more % of a declining market seems like a fool's errand, when they have bigger fish to fry now.
why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue?
Because of revenue? a large seller of windows is genuinely just it’s market cap, it doesn’t really have a lot of killer utility compared to contemporaries. If it loses market cap then it’s a precipitous issue for them as there’s no point choosing the OS for other reasons, it simply lacks the value.
It’s market cap comes from people thinking it has a huge audience and so tailoring software for that audience and putting significant resources into that. Without that third-party effort: windows is toast.
>why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue?
Because unless you're from the 90's, the market for desktop operating systems is not one that generates a lot of revenue anymore. That's like laughing at Netflix for loosing DVD rental market share to Blockbuster.
>Because of revenue?
See my comment above. Microsoft makes a fuck tonne of revenue from services no matter if your company doesn't buy Windows PCs. If they buy Macs, they'll still pay Microsoft subscription fees for Office 365, Outlook, OneDrive, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. and soon Copilot AI stuff. All these are platform agnostic and way more profitable for them than selling more Windows licenses.
office365 will die without windows, it’s genuinely terrible on every non-windows platform and onedrive is objectively worse than alternatives too.
Office365 subscriptions are propping up azure numbers, without them their cloud business looks shit, and azure itself is often only used because “we are a microsoft shop”, it’s all inertia.
You're kind of missing the point, which is that they obviously are putting a lot of effort in (we're talking about changes they're making, not stagnation), and actively making things worse. And in doing so they're objectively losing customers. This isn't like the situation where they just stopped updating IE6. They're clearly investing in Windows and doing an AWFUL job. If I were an investor I would be calling for change in the Windows division.
- There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux.
- Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned.
But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though.
Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system.
- 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft.
- 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft.
....
- 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft.
Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.