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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft lost the OS war and is defending Office as best they can, which includes cross-platform tooling.

2nd behind Android if we're counting mobile OS's. But still ahead of computer/laptop/desktop OS's.

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

Microsoft has 75% market share on desktop OS, and is doing a lot to keep it that way (including the windows subsystem for linux and VScode remote that make it easy to develop linux code on Windows)

They lost the server OS war, but desktop Linux seems like it will never overtake Windows and macOS.

They lost every OS market except for the Desktop. Where it is at 75% to 80%, trending downwards. Give it another decade.

Is the market share largely being taken by macOS or something else? Chromebooks perhaps?

macOS is the important one - if Microsoft support for office on Mac wasn’t as good as it is, they could be in existential danger.

Already Google Apps has made a strong play, and Microsoft is doing quite a good job defending. Teams is only a part of it.

And there’s also mobile, which they lost entirely. That could be a risk, too, and they know it.

I don’t know. I bought office for my Mac 4 years ago and used it maybe twice. Google docs might not be quite as good but good enough for most things. I also hate looking at the ribbon (but that is just personal preference).

Yeah, for home/personal use they're all the same, and many people don't own anything Microsoft in that arena - Google docs from a iPhone/Mac/Chromebook are often "good enough".

Businesses they still have a stranglehold, but even there I've noticed it loosening.

In the corporate world, there seems to be a shift towards thin clients running whatever OS works best (homegrown Linux, ChromeOS, macOS) and beefy Citrix servers, as well as another shift to SaaS/on-prem/on-own-cloud web applications.

Guess we're in a revival of the 70s/80s mainframes with dumb terminals again.

Did they lose the OS war? last I checked Windows has higher marketshare than macOS.

I say they did, in that they have to treat other OSes as "real" - if they had dominated as they did in the 90s and early 2000s they would have just made Office for Windows and left everyone else on some Web version.

Over the long run, mobile is king, and windows isn’t there. If Apple or Android figure out how to take advantage of their situation on this, they could overtake windows in 40-50 years.

> they could overtake windows in 40-50 years.

Is that also your overall estimate on how long the mobile paradigm will overtake the desktop one? I would guesstimate that to a decade, or a decade and a half at most, with the degeneration of written language following closely.

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