Windows still claims nearly 80% of desktop market share, while OS X has less than 15%. Linux is around 2%.
Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires it. Google requires it. Amazon requires it. Xbox Live requires it. Facebook requires it. Sony requires it. People are used to this. If you think this will affect Windows in any way, you probably read too much HN.
macOS does not require a cloud account. Technically you don't even need one for iOS, but most people will create an Apple ID for the App Store (and I hope this distribution monopoly on iOS will eventually be broken up).
Neither Mac or Windows really requires an account but they make it an inconvenient path.
Well, kind of. It seems to prompt me once per service, more or less. If I keep closing them, I've found that macOS does eventually shut up.
Isn't that more for security reasons? Apple doesn't want users enabling the root account unless they know what they're doing, so they make it hard to find. (And, really—coming from someone who runs with SIP turned off—there's very little reason to enable that account.)
Desktop OS and apps won’t go away for the next 10 or 20 years by sheer inertia of the corporate market, and the halo effect on home users. And I guess the past month/years issues don’t affect business users (corporate managed desks will have any problematic feature disabled from the start)
“Everyone” migrating to OSX/linux won’t happen for many many years, even if they keep screwimg up home and hobbyist market. Corporate market is also their strong point, so money wise they’ll be fine with that.
Some of that software is Windows-only. There are quite a few good products that run on Mac. Relatively little runs on open platforms like Linux. And for now, macOS has its own issues for long-term professional use, starting with Apple's reluctance to give any sort of concrete guarantees about support longevity. So that can be quite a barrier to migrating away from Windows for businesses.
It would be nice to think that in time Linux or other free platforms would fill the gap, but it's a chicken and egg problem. As an interesting contrast, within a very short time after Adobe went cloud/subscription with the dominant package of graphics/publication software, we had several smaller and more agile competitors entering the market at much more attractive (and non-subscription) price points: Sketch, the Affinity products, etc. We don't know to what extent any of these might already have been in development before and how much they were motivated directly by the shift to Creative Cloud, but we do know that the closest OSS equivalents have been around for years and made negligible impact, which doesn't bode well for the viability of Linux desktops as an alternative platform for "normal" business use (as opposed to, for example, specialist work like software development).
The sheer intertia in businesses of all sizes using Excel will probably never completely go away. It will fade out over decades.
And proper excel (excel 2007!!!) is not on Mac OS , Linux or in the cloud.
On the other hand, IME this is more of an enterprise-scale thing. Smaller businesses tend to be less firmly tied to existing software packages, and do less heavily customised work with Excel specifically, so there's likely to be less of a barrier for them to migrate.
Would you see a future where gamers would embrace linux in enough numbers that it becomes a main platform ? I see their communities as willing to bear with some level of technical complexity as long as there are clear results, I was seeing the driver issues as the only real showstopper to have them move out of windows.