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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

>and Microsoft dominance (i.e. x86 dominance) is fading.

What?

It used to be almost all non-technical businesses used Windows and other Microsoft products for almost everything. I don't know if you're younger but you may not be able to appreciate how much their dominance has faded in the last twenty years, due several shifts after each other, but most recently to the comprehensive switch to software-as-a-service.

Windows is down to 75% desktop usage share worldwide and 60% usage share in the United States. Still a majority, but a far cry from the days where it held 90%+ usage share. It's usage share has gradually and very quietly eroded.

Nevermind that the desktop/laptop OS market itself is no longer as important as it was in the 2000s.

And I guess almost all of those Windows servers in the back offices of small businesses running Active Directory and Exchange are now also gone.

Or just running the same way they were set up a decade ago with no security patches or anything

I think the better metric is the size of Microsoft's moat. How many applications are left that people depend on that only run on Windows? I could switch to Mac today and not miss anything. Linux, not so much, but a lot of normal, non-techie people find it's enough.

What I meant is: a few years ago, Windows was set - either you used Windows (usual) or MacOS (you got spare money), or you probably used Linux or something else (geek).

In Server-Space, you mostly used either Linux or Windows ASP. Nowadays, not so much anymore. Linux prevails (and doesn't care if x86 or ARM) and Windows is losing grounds week by week (even MS itself seems to favor Linux for server-side stuff, or technology-agnostic NPM etc.).

Even on laptop and desktop machines Linux is gaining momentum (but is still far behind Microsoft), but that market is getting smaller and smaller.

So, my personal opinion is that the x86 dominanace is fading. Not Azure, not Microsoft as a whole, but the presence of its desktop operating system, as it seems to me, definitely is losing importance fast.

I'd not be surprised if MS offers a linux window manager which emulates windows, so to speak.

Indeed. The big boys all made their own CPUs, and the growth market has been mobile. And x86 isn't there. The architecture is still big, but under pressure from both sides.

I'm not really sure what to make of that. On one hand, yes, more and more things are being done in browsers, and possibly on phones, which in theory de-emphasizes the importance of x86 and Windows.

On the other hand, especially when it comes to laptop market share diminishing, I don't even know how many times and over how many years I've heard people say that laptops will become obsolete because of phones.

Hasn't happened, at least for people who use their devices for almost any kind of work. For finding a repair shop for whatever you need repaired? Sure, most people will probably use their phone for that, and people who only need an internet device for things like that might not bother with more than a phone. Writing a report or a plan? Not so much.

I honestly don't think the market for laptops is going to diminish that much when jobs become more and more white-collar.

With Apple's non-negligible market share and their using a different CPU architecture, combined with the emphasis on web and browsers, x86 will probably become less of a de facto standard. But it would take a lot to topple the inertia of Windows in the consumer on non-tech work market.

I didn't want to argue laptops are becoming obsolete. In fact I think they'll become more important - the share of desktops + laptops is shrinking, but laptops are gaining disproportionally over desktops.

Nevertheless, the importance of the OS shrinks in my opinion. Either you use windows, then you're (still) bound to x86 (yes, Windows technically supports other platforms, but this is mostly history), or you're using a Mac (BSD-based OS, doesn't really care which architecture) or something else (i.e. Linux, which also doesn't care).

Microsoft isn't stupid by far. As soon as the market doesn't favor Intel/x86 anymore they'll pivot to providing a linux window manager (earning money with telemetry and their office platform).

I'm convinced Intel has to play a big card soon (and I'm quite sure they will), or they're history, comparable to IBM in 2000-2010.

Laptop sales grew slightly in 2019 and massively in 2020, desktop sales have dropped for the past 10 years every year, tablets were big in 2013-15, but dropped about 25% since then.

These days you have to cover 5 platforms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Web, so most people, including Microsoft, pick Web first and everything else is based on that web version.

I will be on a laptop/desktop always, because they are just better.

That said I can also see the business savings from switching to something like an iPad or a Chromebook. Excellent battery times, no need to manage the devices and if they are lost or stolen you just grab a new one from storage. As a company you are using cloud based stuff anyway (Microsoft or Google, it doesn't really matter).

There might be some specialized stuff that you can't do on a Chromebook (software development comes to mind) but for sales, business and everything else?

As for personal stuff? I can see more students buying an iPad or a Chromebook and just typing out their essays on that.

I agree, it seems many consumers no longer use Windows. For many people today their primary computer is a smartphone or tablet running Android or iOS.

Everyone I know is buying new M1 macs. There is simply no competition currently for the price and performance. I hate Apple, but I am considering getting one too. I am tired of my Intel laptop constantly spinning loud fans.

My old MacBook Pro is in desperate need of an upgrade, but I'll probably wait for the next iteration on the M1 (probably due sometime this fall) before I upgrade. Far too much stuff I use comes from outside the Apple RDF, and is likely to drag its feet for as long as possible before bothering to make a native build. (Plus I still occasionally have reason to fire up VMware, but I'll soon offload that job to a separate machine.)

Thankfully I've always treated my laptop as a secondary machine, and my current one only gets painful (or really just hot and poor on battery life) when I'm trying to run modern video codec stuff on it.

>Everyone I know is buying new M1 macs.

Where?

The dominance of x86 PCs, which are Microsoft's bread and butter (the "Wintel" platform), is fading, as more people are using ARM devices as their main or only computing device. Arguably. I think that's what they meant, anyway.

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