This is basically an article by a guy angry that the UI for printers changed and predicting the end of the Windows empire based on that.
I suspect this is on purpose.
Quite basic stuff, at least it's still available in the old control panel for now.
We did not manually muck with control panels per station. I could not care less what the settings UIs for home installs of Windows are.
And that's the real truth, power users and these small fry IT install bases are not major markets. The most prominent markets are OEM installs for non-technical home users (who hate complex panels and love the push-button UIs), and large 3/4/5 digit enterprise installs that do not give a damn about this stuff because they're using MDT (or whatever) to deploy images to all their stations and not playing with this per-station configuration stuff.
We all go through that stage, it's natural.
I once installed Linux on all my siblings' desktops because I had convinced my parents it would lead to "less viruses" (Fedora 13, I think, GNOME 2, those were the days). The nightmare of providing support for that over the rest of my high school years provided me with a powerful and important lesson.
You have few reasons to stick with Windows, you are a very, very tiny droplet in an ocean of users with different needs than you. Judging what such markets will do based on your personal needs is unwise.
And honestly, breaking Printers is a thing that everyone is going to care about, especially people in a workplace.
You're right that the home market is shrinking though, the OEM install market is down billions in revenue and has been dropping by double digit percentages each fiscal year, but you're wrong in your assumption that the power user market is worth anything. Power users, represented by direct license installs, are a rounding error of Windows revenue. There's nothing worth fighting for there.
Convincing Mom that she should buy a Windows laptop instead of an Apple laptop is still worth ~$750M/Q, and Mom doesn't ever want to see the old Windows panels, she loves the "Add Printer" button. Convincing Timmy Q Hacker that he should buy a Windows license key instead of installing Arch Linux is worth squat.
It is literally impossible to do this. Revenue is the only thing that matters when measuring markets. If it doesn't affect the bottom line, it does not matter.
Passion does not sell OEM installs or license keys. Creators and hackers didn't buy MS products in appreciable numbers to begin with (compared to consumer and enterprise markets), so to the degree MS can be said to be losing them, MS does not care. If moms and humanities majors stopped buying laptops entirely and that $750M/Q dropped to the ~$1M/Q the power users drive, MS would probably pull out of the OEM license market.
This is a very different mindset about how businesses operate than you seem to share, which is fine, I'm explaining it not trying to convert you to it.
Anyhow, that's what Microsoft is abandoning. Familiarity. If young people do not learn MS Windows and MS Office during school or at home, the grip on the enterprise will vanish. We already see it in tech-oriented departments, where Macbooks reign supreme. I for one wouldn't like to use a Macbook, but I sincerely hope that MS grip on enterprises is broken sooner rather than later.
They never opened such panels, they don't read error messages, they just say "the printer doesn't work". If the "Add Printer" button doesn't work it's all over for them. The only thing you can do is make the "Add Printer" button as good as possible.
The least common denominator is so much lower than you think it is. It's why Jobs and Timmy Apple worked so hard to eliminate the concept of the "file system" and make everything built around the concept of the "app". These abstractions that seem intuitive to power users and technical people are nonsense to the much larger market of push-button users, and that's where all the money is outside B2B enterprise.
Apart from the issue of needing control panels mostly to solve problems, they're just not great.
Windows legendarily keeps multiple versions of them, while for ios/macos it's a game of finding which image is actually a clickable button or understanding that wi-fi hotspot is under sharing and not networks. The FA was about command line incantation to fix printers and of course at every new macos version there will be a set of new defaults to get back behaviors. I think that's just the way of life at this point.
Right now, we have machines that basically do what macs do (traditional "computing", a mouse, a keyboard a screen, office or image related work).
Then you have tablets (the whole Surface Pro line + 2 in 1 convertibles) and their touch options, including the impact on existing settings (you now have two or more sets of keyboards that might be in different mappings with different interlocked behaviors. Same for screens. and so much more)
Then thin clients, mirroring and remoting. For mac it's remote desktop or screen mirroring at most. Windoes gets a flurry of inbetweens.
Then all the hardware that only works on Windows and need some way to be managed relative to the system.
All in all, mac made the choice to only cater to the proverbial 20 of the 20/80 power law. Windows fundamentally can't just pile on the existing chaos, even if it means bringing new layers of chaos.
I don't even think a full rewrite in a new layer would be humanly possible at this point.
Not in the modern era, but I do love this one from Mac OS 1: https://i.imgur.com/XKfnGMl.png
Will the 10 person SME run such an setup? Unlikely. Can a 100 person SME that employs four MSCE run such a setup? Yes, but you only need two RHCE or LPIC-2 admins now (for vacation and somesuch). Those are rare, I know, but they will scale to 1000 persons, no problem.
Android Linux and iOS are what killed MS's stranglehold on consumer electronics. GNU is a footnote in the history of MS's rise and fall in the space.
Using old Control Panel (Start->Run->control)
Clicking on this will redirect you to the new settings printer that gives NO options to do any advanced troubleshooting and removes the ability to FIX the issue!
These days, I print so little I either stop at my local library, where printing is free, or I pay a pittance to print at a shop. It would take me a decade or more to pay off a printer when pages cost $.10.
- 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft.
- 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft.
....
- 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft.
Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.
(Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... )
Not saying they're right or wrong, just saying it seems to be working for their bottom line as Windows is less relevante towards that as the PC market has been in a continuous decline anyway in the last decade.
Fighting to capture more % of a declining market seems like a fool's errand, when they have bigger fish to fry now.
Because of revenue? a large seller of windows is genuinely just it’s market cap, it doesn’t really have a lot of killer utility compared to contemporaries. If it loses market cap then it’s a precipitous issue for them as there’s no point choosing the OS for other reasons, it simply lacks the value.
It’s market cap comes from people thinking it has a huge audience and so tailoring software for that audience and putting significant resources into that. Without that third-party effort: windows is toast.
Because unless you're from the 90's, the market for desktop operating systems is not one that generates a lot of revenue anymore. That's like laughing at Netflix for loosing DVD rental market share to Blockbuster.
>Because of revenue?
See my comment above. Microsoft makes a fuck tonne of revenue from services no matter if your company doesn't buy Windows PCs. If they buy Macs, they'll still pay Microsoft subscription fees for Office 365, Outlook, OneDrive, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. and soon Copilot AI stuff. All these are platform agnostic and way more profitable for them than selling more Windows licenses.
Office365 subscriptions are propping up azure numbers, without them their cloud business looks shit, and azure itself is often only used because “we are a microsoft shop”, it’s all inertia.
Look at the feedback on Windows Me, Windows 8, The IE monopoly, breaking web standards, etc etc.
- There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux.
- Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned.
But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though.
Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system.
[0]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-da...
edit: It was 53% when the article was written. The statistics they link say it's now 64%.