The Lightness of Windows
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Compared to that, and especially to a casual observer, he looked disengaged at the Win11 launch event. But it's probably a consequence of having to perform in front of a camera and not be able to move around as much.
I must be in the minority here, but I actually find it very refreshing to watch him speak in these sorts of events. I'm guessing that you are mostly talking about Panos when you mention that "presenters felt like they were on the verge of tears" since the other presenters seemed to me much more relaxed and "normal", for lack of a better term. From my own perspective he comes across as genuinely being excited about the work they're doing and doesn't seem to have a problem falling into his own rhythm while presenting.
Intellirogue's comment mentioning his facial expressions also made me realize that his presentation style might just be closer to what I see in myself; I find myself in situations quite frequently where I am genuinely excited about something and those around me think that I'm feigning excitement. Whether or not his delivery style is universally more palatable to people, I personally feel more connected to it and there is something about it that ends up coming across to me as more relatable and sincere.
I also think it might be a positive thing for us to leave open the possibility that some of these execs are as passionate about these things as anyone on HN would want them to be. I would love to have people at Microsoft and Apple and Google creating things that they feel are so incredible that they're on the verge of tears.
Nothing in the presentation was something to cry over. Nobody in the audience is ecstatic, nearly crying, about how Teams is built in to the OS, or that the Start Menu button is now in the center and how that now puts you in the center (his words). We all know this isn't a big deal and yet he's so emotional about it, and that's off-putting and makes it feel fake and forced.
It's an extreme reaction to details that, frankly, most of us are looking on in horror over. Upsetting 26 years of muscle memory is a good idea? Building Teams into Windows, which almost no family uses and is a resource hog, is a good idea? A good idea so good it's worth trying not to cry over?
They are coached and it's scripted.
Watching an Apple Presentation is like watching really bad actors try to read a dramatic script, which is fine, because they're not actors and there shouldn't be a script, but it's still funny.
It's sometimes a little bit comical - when Tim Cook raises his voice to say something more poignant - you can just see the 'forced' nature of it. I can imagine the poor coach, like a high school choir director flailing her hands, trying to get 'a little more emote'.
Watch their hand movements - sometimes it's really overly expressive and unnatural.
In particular, listen to the pacing. For a long time now they've really slowed down the cadence, it's almost odd.
In the end I don't think we should ready any of this into anything. It's basically irrelevant.
It probably helps that they also show the features at more than 12fps. The demos of Windows features made them look janky.
That’s James Bond of course :)
Really wonder where this comes from.
Rough estimates of worldwide users:
- Windows: 1.5 billion
- macOS: 100 million
- Android: 2.8 billion
- iOS: 700 million
That's hardly "Apple reigning supreme".
20 years ago, if you asked people "what does a computer look like?" they thought of Windows, and they were excited about it. Today, it's Apple.
It's the classic "what devices 16 year olds are asking their parents for?" survey, which hovers around like 90% pro-Apple. That's a future dollar, and one that will very likely go to Apple (unless they trip over themselves / get too high on their supply).
Also! Apple undoubtedly gets the most value-per-unit … App store sales ($138/user/year! [1]), iCloud subs, branded accessories, line-extension stuff (homePod, Apple TV, etc.). So while they may not dominate in unit percentage, they probably get like 80% of the total revenue* in the space.
* kneejerk based on prior revenue breakdowns + gut feeling alone [1] https://sensortower.com/blog/revenue-per-iphone-2020
Only in America.
Most people in the rest of the world doesn't use Apple computers or phones.
And asking your friends and family is the text book definition of selection bias, so not exactly a reliable data point...
Are you sure about that?
Windows dominates the high-end computer gaming market, which a lot of this demographic is into. That's a $40+ billion market, representing a large number of Windows users.
Where?
> App store sales ($138/user/year! [1]), iCloud subs, branded accessories, line-extension stuff
Yeah...because everything there is expensive and therefore aims for the upper class (or people who want to look like it).
But I'm quite sure they feel very much supreme.
Outside of US no amount of marketing would convince significant number of people to buy a product, that has nearly 100% same functionality (maybe even slightly less) for 2x markup for home. Elsewhere they just convinced most people, that iPhone is a status thing.
That's neither here nor there, though, and I would hardly say that means that Apple "reigns supreme", or remotely close. It seems like they're an important player among important players.
Microsoft, Apple, Google (with a subscript of Samsung), and to a much lesser degree Sony dictate our digital life now.
But IMO there really isn’t a single dominant platform right now, with Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux all being highly relevant in different niches.
I hope this number is much smaller and the gap we are looking at is more due to unreported usages.
I swear at one point a presenter said something like “the start button is in the center because the product puts you at the center,” and assertions about how Windows enhances how you "engage with the product"
I don't think I've seen Panos Panay less enthusiastic than this in any of his presentations.
Integrating OneDrive automatically for Photos, Documents, etc, can seriously aide in protecting those important files for end users, since the un-encrypted versions of their files will still be available on OneDrive after a successful attack.
What if Defender was only an option for Microsoft account users? Then it'd be "look at these greedy assholes that just want to collect all your data", when really it'd be an effort for them to protect the reputation of Defender by forcing full functionality by default.
I've yet to actually have it work in in actuality (I have never experienced a ransomware attack either professionally or personally) but I've definitely experienced secure delete programs attempt to do a low level overwrite with random data get interrupted by such systems. I once told sdelete.exe to wipe an entire directory. It furiously ran, did a bunch of disk IOPS, halted a minute or two into the process due to a permissions error, and all my files were fine. A second or two later the security software notified me of a cryptolocker infection it prevented and happily showed me the command I had entered moments before.
Its no free lunch though. IOPS performance is a little lower and there's more CPU/RAM usage per IOPS when the protection is on.
As for why/whether Microsoft should decide that, it's kinda their call. Plenty of other apps/services/devices require an account of some type. (effectively) All require agreement with their terms of service.
By your logic, why aren't you irritated that Microsoft requires any type of account at all for Windows (same for any other OS)?
In light of this, I don't trust that some future outage of a Microsoft service would prevent me from logging in to or using my own computer, which is totally unacceptable.
You can also set up a new Windows 10 Pro installation without a network cord plugged in and it dramatically simplifies the setup process skipping the whole MS account dance other than telling you that you can do it if/when you connect the machine to the network later.
Windows at work is locked down and I guess functional for the thousands of people who want to write word docs and just need things to work.
My home Windows is a nightmare to admin and has made my kids not like computers (particularly sad because my youth was spent poking around widows). It has malware despite all the Windows bloat that constantly pegs the CPU. It also frequently prompts for admin for unknown reasons. It also will force updates that take an hour. It also has things that don’t work, like screentime that blocks the UI but still allows processes to run, with audio and video.
I have a pinhole and it’s constantly calling out to numerous services.
It’s such a terrible experience from an admin and user perspective. I hope windows11 helps. I suspect that we’ll just give up games and buy a ps or xbox and the kids will live on iPad or android with a game system.
Windows has an opportunity to be a hub, but their stuff is so bad right now.
This is really visible for me. I had historically owned relatively recent hardware. No longer. My various PC's are all 4th, 5th, and 6th gen Intel. I do not a lot, but a non-trivial amount of software development, use a fair amount of native apps, etc. In other words, not just "surfing the web". And the performance is fine/acceptable. I care much more about 16GB of memory and an SSD than I do about the CPU or even the GPU.
I don't know, however, how common that is. I'm sure there are a lot of people for whom recent hardware still matters a lot.
Nadella: In our case at Microsoft, I’ve always felt that, at least the definition of a platform is: if something bigger than the platform can’t be born, then it’s not a platform. The web, it grew up on Windows. Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.”
Yes, it was born on Windows, and you did everything in your power to strangle the web in its crib. And now, when it's convenient, you try to take credit for birthing it?
So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.
In 1995 windows was at his birth. The majority of people used other protocols than http to explore the internet. I was searching for a DOS browser to run it on the university computer (DOS diskless) to see the new web. Then MS bought Spyglass (or something) and they destroyed Netscape by bundling IE with windows. Windows did not bring anymore the web to the masses than netscape, chimera and others did. They just happened (as today) to hold a monopolistic position on the market and exploited this position.
This is actually kind of an amazing story when you dig into it. Microsoft licensed Spyglass -- which was the commercialized version of the original Mosaic -- on a royalty basis. Microsoft's version of Spyglass was Internet Explorer 1.0, part of the commercial "Microsoft Plus!" package. But then Microsoft released IE separately for free, and when it was bundled with Windows, a bit of accounting sleight-of-hand treated it as $0 direct revenue (after all, it's just freeware they're not making you download separately, right?). So, the royalty payment to Spyglass became: $0. They still paid a fairly small flat minimum, but that was it.
Amazing: causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing.
Awesome: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.
So, "Amazing" is not incompatible with "Despicable". It's like a magnitude without a direction (whereas "despicable" is magnitude and direction).
Amazing's common usage was too ambiguous for this topic for me. :)
>Quote : That is going to be the fundamental challenge in such a world, but we feel that there are ways. One of the ways I look at this is you can light an Android app or a PWA app or a UWP app on Windows in the future, or even today, for some of the new AI APIs.
Probably not, but there is some correlation I guess
My worst experience with Internet Explorer didn't even have to exist. Why did Windows 98 do Windows Update with Internet Explorer? Was there a technical reason why Windows Update had to be coupled with an open web browser session? My memory isn't that good but from what I recall it was really painful over dial up (technically up to 48kbps but in practice, you'd be lucky to get half of that).
Yes, it was so that Microsoft can claim that IE4 was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed.
At the time, it was indeed a gift and Netscape was already on its dying legs with Netscape 6, bloated beyond recognition
Windows in 1994 was not the kind of walled garden where Microsoft could have forced users exclusively onto MSN. When the web turned out to be the winner, Microsoft had to adapt and build their own browser; they couldn’t just tighten the App Store screws like Apple would do in a similar situation on iOS.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about the above, since I'm going off childhood memories here.
Before that you had to install TCP/IP separately on any non-Unix boxes. Personally I had been using the net for years at that point.
It was his memo that lead to reshaping Microsoft's direction with Windows and the internet with the inclusion of TCP/IP in Windows 95.
Allard went on to be a key member of the original Xbox launch team and Xbox Live. Unfortunately a lot of what he worked on post-Xbox was not as successful and he left Microsoft around a decade ago.
Since then he hasn't been involved in much of note, or at least nothing to the same scale and impact as his earlier work. Although topping his internet memo and the launch of Xbox and Xbox Live is pretty hard to do to be fair :)
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/026-blue-s...
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/029-tellin...
I rarely used floppies, we did most trading via BBSs or even direct dial. Telix was in my autoexec I used it so much.
I'm old enough to have lived through ie6. They did everything they could to hold the web back a generation because they saw the future and it was web services and the open web doesn't exclusively run on windows.
They did not however, prevent you from downloading and installing netscape like Apple is currently doing with iOS.
I believe that was Nadella's main point, which I don't disagree with.
While they did attempt to embrace, extend, extinguish, the platform was fundamentally not locked down which still allowed the web to take over.
They absolutely tried to, and were only stopped because the Justice Department told them that bundling IE with Windows was an illegal use of monopoly power. It's interesting that Nadella gives Microsoft credit for that and not Attorney General Janet Reno, under whose authority the Justice Department pursued the anti-trust case against Microsoft that led to browser bundling being declared anticompetitive.
I don't know about netscape, but I currently use a browser other than Safari as my default browser. Unless you mean the underlying framework is WebKit?
Apple gets complete control over what a webpage can do, and chooses the features it supports to ensure the web cannot compete with the app store
The funny thing about that phrase is that it was invented to describe Active Directory's relationship with LDAP and Kerberos. Active Directory is definitely one of Windows's killer applications, and rather than attempting to kill it, Microsoft instead makes a killing off of it.
"In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer; like the object element, it can load or fetch content asynchronously. In 1998, the Microsoft Outlook Web Access team developed the concept behind the XMLHttpRequest scripting object.[4] It appeared as XMLHTTP in the second version of the MSXML library,[4][5] which shipped with Internet Explorer 5.0 in March 1999.[6]"
This was Microsoft's single biggest contribution to the early web. Everyone likes to hate on IE but actually it did include a lot of innovation.
IE had many issues supporting other crucial (and standard) technologies like CSS, images + alpha blending, basic ease of use features (tabs, accessibility, extensions), security (a good chunk of the ciphersuite was missing), etc.
Sure, MS was bad. Doesn’t change the fact that most people first experienced the internet through Windows. And it was that audience that brought business and more money.
Having been in the community pretty deeply in those days, I can assure you that Apple didn’t gain any sizeable market share until Web 2.0. The prototype.js + Rails developers definitely preferred OS X for their tool suite. The growth of backend developers, in general, led to Apple’s growth; via developer’s needing terminal access and easy installation/management of backend tools with ease of use.
If you're talking pre-Windows 95, certainly Mac was more popular than after it's release. But the OS also had a much more sizeable marketshare[1] and the inverse was true (Windows was devoid of software and tools). At the same time, however, the web was also much smaller and certainly still in it's nascent infancy.
Ultimately I think they saw it as a delivery mechanism for their technology which is a reasonable bet.
>In our case at Microsoft, I’ve always felt that, at least the definition of a platform is: if something bigger than the platform can’t be born, then it’s not a platform. The web, it grew up on Windows. Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.”
That's hard to argue. AOL made it where Prodigy and Compuserve withered because it embraced the WWW on .... Windows. I would also agree that Microsoft didn't do much to have the web grow up on Windows; in fact they actively thwarted it in many ways including their embrace, extend extinguish strategy. They mistakenly believed that controlling the browser was the key to controlling the internet.
> it was born on Windows
It was born on the NeXT operating system. That was the Steve Jobs creation that Apple bought and used as the foundati0on for OS X. Here's the actual history:
It was popularized on Windows, but that's not the same thing.
But yes, Microsoft did everything in their power to, if not strangle the web, at least to turn it into a Microsoft walled garden.
Microsoft may have been late to the party but, considering how they basically owned the client-side, they had time to recover. In just a few years IE ate 90%+ of the browser world.
Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.”
That is, in fact, exactly what Microsoft tried to do. They tried to force their own proprietary standards on the web. It was only after they were slapped down by the Justice Department that they stopped engaging in anti-competitive behavior and created the space for alternative web browsers to grow. Even then, it was almost too late. How many decades did we wait for IE6 to finally die so that we could write web sites that would even pretend to conform to modern web standards?
While I agree that Microsoft worked hard to hold back innovation on the Web in its early days, you are changing the words of a quote so you can then attack the quote, and that's not a good look.
Ignoring the statement for a moment, Nadella killed "Windows First" thinking. It took me a long time to believe they were actually doing it, but SQL server, and then Teams -- a component of office -- along with the fact that SQL works better in Linux than on Windows (embarrassingly so in frequent cases), Outlook 365 in Firefox works better on any OS than Outlook on Windows, .NET Foundation/open source .NET core going from "a sort-of .NET for those of you who insist on using non-Windows stuff, to working better for nearly everything than the "Full Framework"[0].
Had that same sentence been altered by one, easy to slip on, word it would have been far more accurate ("ignoring" facts rather than outright lying about them): "The web, it grew up with Windows" or along side Windows. Accurate would be "dragged Windows with it kicking and screaming at times" and "Windows as actively hostile toward the web" but I don't expect the best CEOs of the least important companies to be that honest. I'd love it, but it might not fly on Wall Street.
Had Microsoft continued in its monopolistic behavior, it's arguable that MS tried to and possibly could have delayed the success of the Internet via its refusal to support internet protocols natively in the OS (Windows 95's earliest version lacked Internet Explorer, but also didn't include tooling -- IIRC -- to speak SLIP/PPP or anything outside of NetBIOS, including TCP/IP/UDP by default). The browser would could have done without the "kill Netscape at all costs" behavior, but even that produced tangible benefits at the end of the day.
I can't pretend to read his mind, but I doubt he doesn't recognize the stupidity in that statement -- it's possible, but it would be contrary to what I've experienced.
I'd love to know what Microsoft would have done with Nadella at the helm during that important time. I don't think what I know about Microsoft, today, would mean that they'd have embraced the open web back then. I'd take it as a strong positive if Nadella, today, believed he would have led Microsoft here all the way back then, but there's so much hindsight in that conclusion. Most major players at that time were looking to "lock in users, using the internet, somehow" at the time, that it wasn't an obvious, correct, choice that one could sell to shareholders at that time. None of those major players (save Oracle) made a hard turn at some point and look nothing like they do today, culture-wise (Oracle was negatively affected by it all but Larry Ellison's reality distortion field appears to be alive and well over there). In a lot of ways, the "locked in users" is the internet we have, today, but the companies from back then largely didn't become the winners in today's locked-in world (save Amazon).
[0] See my other comment for the variety of things that Microsoft at least owes to Nadella's willingness to reshape internal culture in a way I wouldn't have expected would be possible.
So reality is as I described : hubris and marketing resulting in nothing but stagnated excrement for everyone unfortunate enough to have to deal with them. Again. Same as the last executive positions there.
If Microsoft hadn’t had their hands in our technology future we’d be further along and better off. All they have done is set our expectations low.
Hell I even have met Bill back in the early 90s on a couple of occasions and got some books signed.
I’ve also been on the end of having products pulled from under me causing massive rewrites of stable LOB applications, on the end of audits and bugs that are so abhorrent that their own internal division heads got involved at the time.
What’s worst is I burned possibly tens of years of human lives on things which were directly their fault through absolute incompetence and negligence towards their customers or burning their entire roadmap for something new and shiny.
So quite frankly I think I’m fairly qualified to tear them a new one when I see fit.
Edit: as always I notice that the moment the US wakes up any critical posts about MSFT magically start plummeting. Reputation that important? Earn it!
Had they actually tried to replace office, I think they could.
(As the saying goes, the first 90% is the easiest part)
Microsoft survived successfully and thrives today even if they don't have the leadership in may areas.
It is a matter of market demand... windows is no longer as valuable as it was and will eventually become a second class legacy product. When that will happen is hard to predict.
Apple recognized this years ago about its OS, of course, but I'm not sure I agree with the statement above. The entrenchment of Windows in the enterprise is huge for Microsoft, and keeps the door propped open there for most of their efforts.
What I mean by 'keeps the door propped open' is that a generation of 'Microsoft stack' developers and development has created a corporate infrastructure landscape that has been paved and fenced by Microsoft's Windows (and to a degree, the .NET ecosystem).
Not that they are bad, they just aren't all that special.
Japan has a higher share of iOS than the US or UK. Also China is ~20% iOS. Sounds small until you realize that percentage equates to more iOS devices than the US.
In Argentina for example an iPhone is around 2500 USD (100% import tax), an average citizen needs to save for a year to afford an iPhone.
A couple of years maybe, and you won't be getting the latest gen one.
You will not fine Macs in India, except in the 1%, or in movies.
I am sure that is true for most of South Asia.
It's Windows all the way down. There is a huge black market for pirated windows copies here and a decade back, the standard PC setup was a basic Intel based system, loaded with pirated windows os on a cd that costs about 2 USD.
[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-01-1...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
[3] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...
[4] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...
As well as having 55% US marketshare as other posters have mentioned, they account for 42% of global smartphone profits despite only having 17% marketshare.
https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2021/04/apples-...
Nowadays a lot of people that used a mac went back to Windows, because let's face it, it's more stable, it's faster, and consumes less resources. I once was a macOS user, and the latest release was so slow on my 2015 macbook pro (that still is a pretty good hardware) that made me format everything and install Linux on it. Now it seems to me that I have a brand new computer...
In the professional market there is only Windows. In every big company everything is Microsoft, Windows, Office, Active Directory, Exchange, Windows server, Azure. Probably the reason is the IT department likes Windows more since it's easier to maintain than macs.
Regarding iPhone, they are not so diffuse as they are in the US. In my country you have a 19% iPhone, and it's one of the European countries where they are more prevalent, and still it's a minority. Most of the people uses Android phones, and doesn't want to spend more than 200 euros for a phone.
Probably in the US iPhone are so diffuse because you usually get them with your mobile plan, while in my country no one buys a phone that way, since you will end up paying it like double the price and you loose the freedom to change the provider as you wish.
People (consumers) see the Mac prices and balk because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300.
Businesses see the Mac prices (and, barring upgrades): they see that they're cost competitive with the contemporaries.
Dell XPS, HP Elitebook, Lenovo Thinkpad Txx (or Carbon X1) are all in spitting distance and in some cases even more expensive than Macbooks.
That's before you even talk support contracts or yearly licenses (the OEM license on the unit is rarely the one you'll use, usually you have a volume license and a KMS server which also costs a lot of money).
Also, when it comes to management for a small or even medium sized business, look at Apple's approach to management: https://www.fleetsmith.com . Dead simple pricing, dead simple UI, and they provision your devices out of the box without any manual setup. You can just buy 50 MacBooks, Apple will automatically ship them set up to your employees for no charge, and you'll pay a several bucks a month per device for management.
Now compare that to how you manage a Windows deployment. By comparison, it's unintelligible. You need to upgrade every device to Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise as part of a contract to join a domain, set up a domain server with Active Directory to have a user store, add connects to connect the Directory to the Domain which may or may not require a Windows Server, which may or may not require the arbitrary Windows Server CALs, and then you have to manually set up and wipe each device out of the box unless you managed to get a special deal with the OEM...
As I found with Lenovo and their bizarre continued use of 1080p as a baseline everywhere in CURRENT_YEAR, if you specifically go looking for laptops with even just 1440p displays the prices quickly inflate towards Apple levels.
...it even has a bigger screen and hard drive!
Nowadays macs are the nightmare of every IT department, the smallest that on a PC takes a couple of minutes, like changing an hard drive or a RAM module, it's a major surgery on a mac, where it's still possible and where you don't get all the things soldered on the main board.
You have an OS problem on a mac? Good luck wasting hours reinstalling the operating system manually and then installing all the software. On Windows? You have your custom install ISO with all the drivers and software you need and you install it automatically. Or just have a stack of cloned disks, and in case of a problem just swap the hard drive, in most enterprise computers that have everything tool less is basically the fastest way.
Also Windows machines are usually favorites by the IT departments because they work well with all the Active Directory stuff, meaning that you can manage everything centralized. Yes, you can even on a mac join an Active Directory domain, but you can do less things than with a Windows machine.
And surely you have to develop a lot of custom tooling to administer network made by macs, while on Windows you can do that with standard tooling.
If we're talking about Real Computers, Linux is more rough around the edges, sure. But it has Freedom. And it's a fantastic system for software development.
So it went. I can’t trust it. Not only that with Google’s business model I can’t rationally invest in it. Oh and the handset was abandoned after 12 months. My backup iPhone 5s got an update on 14th June at 7 years old.
As for real computers, yes. The Mac I have is a nice terminal for Linux on a server but Linux on the desktop is not rough round the edges: it’s a nightmare for daily use.
If you use it as you would use Windows or Mac OS, then there are no more issues with Ubuntu from my experience.
I actually prefer Ubuntu over the other two as the web developer experience is much better than Windows and Mac OS. It's nice to use native tools. It's nice to be able to trust profiling. The same is also true for the other two where you would have to use replacement software on Linux.
I do most of my dev work in linux but using the Mac as a terminal.
If I said ARM Cortex M cores dominate the microprocessor market you would rightly dispute that.
I'm utterly unimpressed by what I've seen thus far about Windows 11, but that is just a clownworld take.
Microsoft (rather, some manufacturer shipping MS-bearing machines) is where you go if you don't want, for whatever reason, to pay a premium for that, or you need the best business-oriented integration & management the market provides.
That covers about 99% of all personal and business computer users, between those two—the remaining sliver is mostly Linux and the BSDs. But there's not a ton of market overlap between them, I don't think.
Anyways they are competitors because people do switch between them. Currently I have a MacBook Pro, my next laptop absolutely will not be a MacBook Pro. It's the worst laptop I've ever owned.
And Apple is just getting started. I was amazed at how many Windows only games I could get to work with either CodeWeavers commercialized and drop dead simple to use WINE implementation or the Windows ARM beta running on the Parallels beta.
If Apples new SOC is able to woo more and more people like I think it will to run on Macs at some point developers will notice and the quantity and quality of Mac ports will improve and I may even not need Windows running on my Mac to run all the games I'm interested in. Most of the games I run today have Mac versions already (although that didn't factor into my buying decisions since as I mentioned I also have a Windows box).
I look at this similar to the Blackberry before the iPhone. The year before the iPhone if you would have told me that it Apple was coming out with a phone that would utterly displace Blackberry within the next five years I would have laughed you out of the room - but that's exactly what happened. Nothing is guaranteed, but I wouldn't be shocked to see a significant shift away from Windows for quite a few segments of gaming.
Your post reminds me of the person who said Microsoft Office was going to go out of business when Iwork web launched in 2015. I think any argument that goes "this reminds me of Iphone" is a poor argument.
Absolutely for many CPU bound loads the M1 is a great processor. It just lacks any GPU power which is what you need for games.
Well, yes, if you have any software that is must-have and it's only available for (or best on) one OS, that'll be what you choose.
Incidentally, I'd not put Windows at the top of my list for HTPC. Probably 3rd or 4th under Linux and Android (if I didn't want to pay anything for the OS and wanted more of an appliance, or if I were using anything short of a quite beefy computer—Win10 is high overhead and uses tons of disk) and macOS (if I wanted a desktop experience on the TV and for most advanced media stuff to probably Just Work without having to mess with config files—old Mac Minis are great for this), unless I was also trying to PC-game on a TV.
Yes it matters, and yes it is a threat. At least in certain market.
Mac usage share has increased from near-zero to 30% in the United States over the past fifteen years, while Windows has dropped from 90%+ to 60% in the same time period [0]. The trend is very similar in other wealthy markets. Windows isn't going anywhere, but the era of Windows hegemony in wealthy markets is now over.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
This attitude is why I think Microsoft will continue to be successful and why Nadella is a much better CEO than Ballmer.
and smartphones brought it back.
Shortly after Microsoft started realizing the threat that i-devices posed to the entirety of their business (anyone who had used an iPhone/iPod Touch saw what was coming), they reacted by digging in/"patriotism", with policy changes like: "We'll buy anyone who wants one a Windows Phone 8 device..." because... they were already buying almost everyone an iPhone that asked for one and they needed a way to say "we're going to make it a lot harder for you to show our customers that you prefer an iPhone". My best friend and I had jobs developing/architecting large MS-related things so we regularly assessed the marketability of our skillsets. We both concluded: "Microsoft has one way out of this: give away[1] Windows, probably need to start making Office/Linux work or provide easy integration points for the OS community to integrate with AD/Exchange[2]". I, separately concluded, that I needed to start using a Linux desktop, full time, because no part of me believed they'd do it. It's, culturally, too foreign for them.
And then, they started executing on exactly that plan, consistently. When they'd make the inevitable "Microsoft-centric" decision and get blowback, they'd unexpectedly listen, and either thoroughly explain, or resolve.
Windows 10 isn't free as anyone who's built their own desktop knows. But it's effectively become the last version of Windows you buy, upgraded for life, and they made that retroactive to Windows 7 (do they still do this? not sure). Stuff mostly just works with regard to Linux interop -- NFS is a problem in some contexts, but most of the things that seemed like they existed "just to make it painful to interoperate between the two platforms" are gone, and a lot of that is because Microsoft put money behind intentionally making "The Enemy OS" work, with care spent to not just "make it work" but fix the parts that aren't quite good enough" continuously.
The best part of it, though, is they're operating as the "opposite" of their past behavior with open standards/Linux in general. I wouldn't have been surprised to see an OK implementation of Linux interop on Windows (Windows Services for Unix was the start of that idea), with no attention paid to getting MS apps running at all on the Linux side. I'd have been quite surprised if they wrote anything* for Linux, but they made the important things work well on Linux.
I'm an enthusiastic full-time user of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, with all of one disused Windows OS running in a virtual machine, who writes software almost exclusively in C# (console, web and even an occasional GUI, at home, anyway).
It's not just that they "open sourced a bunch of really important things", but it's how they approached opening up things like .NET Core. They completely failed with the full framework's "Shared Source" crap. They recognized the complete loss of trust that all of us (I am and have been a happy-minus-a-few-things Microsoft customer all of my career).
How many companies much smaller than Microsoft release their "frameworks/libraries/tools/software" as Open Source products but simply refuse to accept a single Pull Request. Basically, "Developing it transparently" -- a good thing -- but failing to "develop in the open". How many tiny little edge cases around the variety of framework Collections required me, in a high-performance scenario, to write an ugly hack because my performance edge-case was not worth fixing. They didn't opt to "develop in the open" and accept only internal PRs. They didn't take it to the next step and "benevolently, (but probably reluctantly) accept the occasional PR). They encouraged developers to submit pull requests using swag/recognition and, most importantly, willingness to accept PRs that aren't all that important to Microsoft (or maybe anyone but that one developer if it doesn't negatively impact anything). They even hosted it on GitHub, despite owning/pushing a competitor at the time, because "that's where everyone really is". A look at some of the core logic around collections (and enum for Pete's sake), turns out that all of those previous edge cases are not only solved, they're solved really, really well[3].
God, please give me a time machine so I can see the reaction when I explain all of this to 12-years-ago me. I "would will have been[4]" more likely to think that this future version of me appeared out of some alternative timeline that I'd never actually see.
[0] Not a dig at the author/topic, I just felt that he was explaining something that "most people who care at all about this topic already knows".
[1] Ideally "open source it" but I knew that was extremely unlikely simply because of legal reasons that are far more complicated than I care to understand.
[2] This was a long time ago; I'd say "Office for Linux" is a necessity, and is acceptable (and I prefer to use Outlook web, no matter the OS; it doesn't endlessly hang), today with the decision to write a Teams for Linux (albeit, with fewer features) client.
[3] I was downright disappointed that a really nice generic Enum library that I wrote is completely pointless in .NET Core. Every single thing that was 10-100 times faster in that library is now slower than just using the built-in stuff. And .NET's implementation uses less memory.
[4] See Douglas Adams commentary on the difficulties of time travel and grammar.
I upgraded -- for free -- a laptop running Windows 7 to Windows 10 about six months ago, long after the free upgrade period ended. I have a Windows 7 box that brings up a nag screen that Windows 7 is out of date and I should upgrade to Windows 10. This screen shows up every few days. So, they still do it.
For what it's worth, I realized after I wrote that original comment that I have a (rather powerful) desktop in my basement that I stopped using several months ago (really, about 2-3 years ago my usage dropped off substantially). I had just done a large hardware upgrade, re-activated Windows 7 Ultimate and ... a project heated up which caused me to not use it for almost six months, the PSU started to flake out, causing it to be unstable under moderate load (with PSU testing A-OK) resulting in another 6-months of reluctant, infrequent, use which became so infrequent that the last time I touched the machine it was to unplug the Ethernet cable as a precaution against accidentally using a two-year out-of-date and out-of-support OS to check my e-mail.
I intended on upgrading it to Windows 10 but fell into one of the worst projects of my life that put it off for 3 months, I had already grown accustomed to using a new laptop, loaded with Tumbleweed which matched my work laptop and just never got around to it.
One of the de-motivators to that was expecting that I'd be forking out money for the upgrade. That's disappeared, now, and I had already planned on finding all of that out this weekend/doing it because I'm at the point where -- though there are one or two things that there is no Linux version of my preferred app, and either my muscle memory in that app is so strong that using the alternative is *tedius as hell, especially for a rare need*, is so bad that calling it an *alternative* is highly misleading. Plus, I'm sitting on a 2070 that I acquired from family near MSRP to add to its existing 1070s and I'm pretty sure my kids will kill me if I wait any longer.
You might say Apple's only dominant market share is in the US (50%) but the reality is that the US dictates what's cool and what's not.
Hospitals, wall street banks and hedgefunds, almost all the big F500 corporations and people who actually do meaningful work for laboratories, engineering plants and refineries, and factories making microchips to cars to Aeroplanes are more than likely to be on Windows.
You've been mislead which makes sense since Apple has the effect more on impressionable people. The world literally runs on Windows. The internet runs on Linux. Apple makes premium consumer devices.
Add macOS' market share and Apple's the single manufacturer of the most popular OSs in the US, with quite a lead even.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states...
> Hospitals, wall street banks and hedgefunds, almost all the big F500 corporations and people who actually do meaningful work for laboratories, engineering plants and refineries, and factories making microchips to cars to Aeroplanes are more than likely to be on Windows.
By saying something about iOS. Engineering plants don't run iOS.
Apple is already screwing over Facebook (look at the features in iOS 15), which is why they could consider doing this.
$2000 to 3000 phone.
Runs Android.
And you know Apple is going to do what they always do. Copy it.
Funny how Apple keeps copying the 'poor man's ideas.
Now, if you're only focused on what's cool and what isn't, of course Apple is going to be the only thing you see... because you're looking for it.
https://qz.com/1575481/would-steve-jobs-like-the-ipad-today/
>The first is that Steve Jobs unabashedly hated styluses. When introducing the first iPhone in 2007, the Apple founder said, “Who wants a stylus? You have to get ’em, put ’em away, you lose ’em. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.”
https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/10/technology/apple-pencil-ste...
I wonder for how long that will stay true, give it a decade and I think that era will be over.