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Comment by smileysteve | Hacker News Reader

95% of a market that has shrunk nearly 50% over the last decade.

In many ways, the consumer and non specialty business are post desktop. Turns out documents, email, and other communication apps cover 90% of use cases. Anything that requires major performance gets rendered in a cloud and delivered by these other apps.

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You live in a bubble, Windows still dominates desktop (obviously, most people can't afford a Mac and the year of Linux on desktop has not come yet)

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

They're not refuting that. They agreed that it's "95% of the market." Their point is that the overall desktop has shrunk, regardless of Windows's share of that.

Note: People questioning the stats

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

Note that this data is missing phones.

2010: 157mm Desktops, 201mm Laptops sold 2019 forecast; 88.4 + 166mm

Or, perhaps better, is in terms of internet use https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/mobile-desktop-internet...

Mobile went from 16.2% to 53% of traffic since 2013; nearly 4 fold. Which means since 2013, non mobile usage went from 84% to 47%; or nearly 50%

Shippments of desktops/laptops doesn't tell the whole story. I'm still using a 2009 desktop (with some upgraded components) and wouldn't show up on any of those stats. Similar story for a lot of my friends. They still use desktops/laptops daily, but they don't replace them as often as in the 2000s.

What do you consider as a specialty business? There are hundreds of millions of professionals - scientists, engineers, accountants, animators, content creators, visual artists, chip design folks, folks writing drivers for equipment, photographers, musicians, manufacturing folks, etc who simply cannot earn a living without native apps. Sure, maybe when those people go home, they don't always need native apps, but IMHO its a mistake to only think about them in such a narrow scope.

You name several that are speciality businesses and are part of that 10%.

But there are definitely examples within Accountants, Animators, and Musicians where Phones, Tablets, and Chromebooks (not specialty desktop apps) have taken over the essential day to days.

For animators; the Ipad VS. Surface face off is a great example -- also where they offload concepts to "the cloud" to render instead of a Mac Pro.

Well, I am not talking about examples, I'm talking about entire industries. For e.g., There is absolutely no way for my industry (vaccine r&d) to any work without native apps. Even for animators, no native apps = no pixar. Maybe you were thinking of some other kinds of animation. I don't disagree that you can find small examples here and there of people not needing native apps in any industry.

really shrunk?

Lots of people use an android or an iPhone as their main computer nowadays. If you're targeting keyboard/mouse style input, then Windows is probably close to as popular as ever. But if you're targeting people using some kind of device to access your service in exchange for money, Windows is wasting your time.

source https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

Sales shrunk doesn't mean usage shrunk. Replacement cycle of PC should be getting longer due to enough performance.

Any PC from the past decade is still mostly serviceable.

I'm finally upgrading from an Intel Sandy Bridge processor after nine years, and I still don't need to - it's cranking along pretty well as a dev and gaming machine still.

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