Steve Ballmer's Nightmare is Coming True
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
This is happening right now. In the third quarter of 2012, PC sales were down 8 percent on a year-over-year basis worldwide. In the U.S., sales were down 14 percent. A big chunk of the decline can be attributed to the rise of the iPad."
Or just that PC speeds have reached a plateau, and common desktop applications no longer need the latest hardware. The continuous upgrade cycle is slowing. I think that speaks for the 8% on its own.
On second glance, this whole article is borderline troll bait.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/29/npd-pc-sales-down-microso...
It also seems things are so bad, that they've already started to raise prices on enterprise customers, from 8% to 400%, trying to milk them as much as possible before they lose them:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/12/03/sales-down-microsoft-rais...
http://microsoft-news.com/black-friday-boosts-windows-8-net-...
"While the days leading up to Black Friday had Windows 8 running below 1% US net usage, Thanks Giving and Black Friday saw a large number of new Windows 8 PCs hitting the market, taking its US share above 2%. While the number reduced over the next week,indicating that Windows 8 users are mainly at home rather than at work, it returned to 2.12% yesterday, indicating the new level was real and not just an artefact of increased usage over the holiday break."
Also, Steam's hardware surveys shows that Windows 8 is at 5% of the userbase, despite's Gabe's comments about the "catastrophe".
http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-8-thunders-past-ma...
The lesser said about Charlie's rants and non-sequitir arguments on SemiAccurate(which should be titled SemiWrong) the better. Just reading his previous articles makes me want to add that site to my /etc/hosts blacklist.
you can also take into consideration the simple fact that each year there is a population growth to some degree, So naturally the figures need to be up. But that's macro economics i really don't know alot about, maybe someone else can explain?
Nobody would predict Windows 8 would "stop" the iPad only a month after release. (not to mention the weird comparison of an operating system to a hardware gadget)
"Employees switching away from Windows PCs", and then citing a large iPad purchase by a company. Again, nobody with half a clue would think that these employees are replacing their work computer with an iPad.
Comparing the years old Apple Store to the brand new Windows Store, and trying to pretend like the numbers mean something.
Saying "office is losing relevance" and then citing absolutely nothing.
Saying Microsoft can't continue to invest the profitable Xbox.. because they can't make it the flagship of the company?
Saying their "platform business is collapsing", and then citing areas where they are doing well, and then just assuming they're all eventually going to fail.
This "writer" needs to be fired.
>This "writer" needs to be fired
The "writer" is more likely to get a pay hike or get promoted because his blogspam is garnering a lot of hits from sites like HN because of the headline and content.
I might be getting too old to understand this but when I was an undergraduate student 14 years ago, I had an 1-hour-battery laptop and was 'really' useful. I can't see how a portable computer (even if I have to plug it to use it) would be 'especially useless' for students.
Coming from a latin-american country, the whole battery life issue sounds a lot like a "1st world problem" to me.
A peak 17W vs 10W draw is a pretty big difference. And that's peak power; Haswell may be even better at idling. We might see 6 or 7 hours on the next Pro (wild guess).
> This "writer" needs to be fired.
That characteristic slowly became more and more ubiquitous... in the internet age, linkbait became Pulitzer's cartoons because that's what attracts attention.
So I'd say it's become a little harder these days to identify sensationalism as such, because sometimes, there's not much about the appearance of the publication that screams 'yellow journalism' anymore... The cartoon has moved into the content itself.
My sample is completely non-scientific, but I can't think of anyone I know like that. My impression is iOS and Android are taking eyeball-time and consumer purchasing money away from PCs, but I just don't see them replacing PCs any more than iPhones or Playstations did. Yet.
What am I missing?
Also think of how long the shift from desktops to laptops took; for a decade they were just secondary machines and everyone who had a laptop also had a desktop. Now... the only person I know to even own a desktop built it himself 6 years ago and stopped upgrading it altogether a few years ago in favor of laptops.
A similar shift to tablets isn't as inevitable as the shift to laptops was (in hindsight), but if it's happening it's proceeding in much the same way, only faster.
So I don't think the physical keyboard is going away, it will still be the most efficient way to bang out a school paper, computer code, or a thoughtful business email.
The screen we prefer to look at while sitting down will probably always be larger than the one we prefer to carry around.
Those are niches. Most computer use is and will be going fwd, consumption. Majority of creation will be photos/videos/minor typing (txting, tweets, short emails)/other forms that don't require keyboard.
I don't doubt that most people will not need a keyboard most of the time, but not needing a keyboard in the house seems more likely to be the niche. The niche will be 23 to 30 year-olds who have finished school but don't yet have kids in school, and the 55's, and up, whose kids have finished secondary school. Perhaps the computer will again be relegated to the spare bedroom / home office, but I can't imagine a scenario for the majority of middle-class households that doesn't have some sort of physical keyboard.
This is a tangent, but I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona, and, based on what I've seen, the answer is often "no;" a lot of students say they've never had to write anything longer than two or three pages before taking Intro to Comp.
Some, to be sure, have done substantive writing, but that appears to be the norm.
A lot of 18-year-old freshmen also appear to be MUCH more proficient at typing on phones and tablets than I am, which definitely gives me a bit of culture shock, and reminds me of the typing proficiency I have that many of my own professors appear not to.
The PC was doing just fine before websurfing came along and even before DVD playback.
And yes, don't complain about being downvoted. From the HN guidelines, http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. "
If you look at my comments you'll see that I don't use this form very often - or maybe even at all. I had slightly worse day yesterday and that's the result and I'm sorry. Do you think I should delete this and the three more comments in this thread, which were made in similar manner?
No (imo). Obsessing about 'correct form' and karma is just as bad as completely ignoring it. Everyone gets downvoted once in a while. Learn from your mistakes, and go with the community ethos, and you'll be fine. Karma is just a number on a webpage.
I didn't even think about karma, honestly, I asked having in mind the quality of the thread. I'm still rather new here, I started posting just a couple of months ago and learned by watching others and not from a textbook of rigid rules and that's why I'm still sometimes unsure about how to proceed; even more so because I actually do care about the 'ethos' (although I probably wouldn't use this word) more than about points of any kind.
Either way, thanks for advice and for taking the time to respond even though this was probably one of the least exciting topics you could discuss here, I appreciate it very much.
I think it's completely plausible that in the next couple of years Apple and Google will launch add-ons to your average tablet that gives you a big, high-res screen to do work on along with a tablet.
Or maybe apps will be able to show content on other tablets (like AirPlay does to a TV today) so that you will have more space available for the apps you use.
I think there will be an opportunity for iOS and Android to innovate in this space, in a far more profound way than the "no compromise" dual-UI that is the current Windows 8.
How many people do you know under 10? That's the generation MSFT needs to worry about.
Anecdotally, the kids I've seen get tablets/phones/ipod touches and blast away on them. They'd vastly prefer a tablet to a laptop. Arguments like "You can do real work on a PC!" are not going to sway them. If anything, it reinforces "regular computers = drudgery, to be minimized as much as possible".
However, as soon as they need to complete a school assignment, they have always used a desktop with a keyboard (we don't have floater laptops). This despite never having had any instruction on how to type. I have never heard them once consider using a tablet for this.
If your kids had a tablet with an excellent keyboard touch cover, would that be enough to never use a traditional PC? They aren't in a position to buy it themselves, of course, but if you had them side-by-side I wonder what they'd prefer.
- Larger display - Keyboard - Mouse - Power
It depends on what your usage requirements are, of course, but once you start carrying around one or more peripherals to make your tablet work for your situation, you have to start asking "Is this really better than a laptop?"
I have a Surface RT with touch cover, but haven't let the kids loose with it much. :-) It's not replacing any of my real PC gear, but mainly because it doesn't run any of my existing apps. However, the Surface Pro is going to be a very interesting mix of capabilities.
(My paranoid side is convinced that our NWO techno-slave-masters are simply using these new form-factors as an excuse to kill freedom.)
What is the world coming to? Next you'll be telling me kids no longer find their chores fun.
Over time, will people veer towards doing "more work" on a tablet or trying to have "more fun" on their PC? I know which side I'd bet on.
So, what do we have then? Do we still have just a tablet? Maybe, but the definition will have changed.
Disclosure: I recently accpeted a position at MSFT (not related to Surface) and am drinking the koolaid.
10 year old kids might not be the best indicator of future trends. After all, we aren't doing our work on the Wii, building our homes using Legos, or any of the other things children spend their time on.
Kids won't do work on the wii... but will they expect (or demand) that devices be motion-aware by default? Screens be touchable by default? Have 10-hour battery life by default? Be comfortably handheld by default?
Think about how downtime has evolved. This century we went from "I'm bored, let me grab a newspaper" to "I'm bored, what's on the radio?" to "I'm bored, what's on TV?" to "I'm bored, what's on the desktop computer?" to "I'm bored, what's on my phone/tablet?"
The earlier industries are dead or stagnant (newspaper/radio), regular TV (at a specific time, interrupted by commercials) is on its way out, the growth is in the new form factor/experience Microsoft is barely relevant in. That's the nightmare.
They liked the iPad experience so much that three of their friends have bought iPads. There's a big market there, and it's hardly been touched.
There are a couple places where they need a bit more than an iPad. The big one is photo management, with a library that's bigger than can fit on the ipad. iCloud isn't there yet. They want to be able to print, write cds/dvds, email them and show them off. There's an opportunity there somewhere.
There are a couple of sticking points:
* There's still going to be space management issues. 2gb on Dropbox doesn't go far when you've got a 4gb cf in the camera, and the next step up is 100gb@$100/yr.
* the other half of space management is clearing it off of the iPad. It's difficult to manage storage of imported photos, it turns out that if you don't delete them after import to iPhoto on your desktop, you either have to delete them individually or use image capture on the Mac to do it. I'd love to see the high res ones synced off to the cloud, leaving smaller jpegs around, but with the promise that the high res ones were securely stored. What I wound up doing for that was using a USB stick and my work netbook as the real storage for all the holiday images, rather than being able to do it on the iPad.
Finally, and this isn't a problem for the inlaws, but for me as a photographer, I shot raw+jpeg. iphoto imported raw+jpeg, and then didn't use any of the raw data, just the small(well, 8mp) jpegs. I tore through them, using iPhoto as a passible Lightroom substitute. And now, the adjustments are orphaned if I want to apply any of them to the raw files. That's annoying. Not critical, but annoying. And it's not as if there isn't a raw converter in the core of OSX that couldn't be used here.
Sidenote: they are thrilled with the transition.
It may be coming...But they've got to get a lot better first.
I don't have any hard numbers either, but people that can't touch type can often type faster using a tab with swiftkey than on a keyboard.
To my defense, I wasn't citing numbers. The 95% thing sounds like a made-up number.
To your point: I don't know exactly what swiftkey is- but it's an interesting idea that these new devices may allow a touch-typing replacement to gain traction. That could be a game-changer, I agree.
This is the main reason I can't switch to IOS from android. I type a lot on my phone, usually work related email.
If it wasn't for the tablet, I'd probably be buying a new computer in the next 12 months. Effectively windows just lost a license sale to the Kindle.
Now, where things get interesting is when it stabilizes. What happens in 24 months when everyone has a tablet and a PC/Mac? Which do people replace, and what does that do to tablet sales vs laptop sales? I have no idea, and I'm sure it depends on new technology, but the future is not as clear to me as many writers assume.
I used to upgrade my main computer yearly, but now doing so every 3 years or so feels more than enough. Most people I know keep theirs for even longer.
On the other hand, my iPad 1 - less than 2 years older than the iPad 3 I now own - feels downright sluggish and old. Many apps don't work on it, and I get tons of crashes on it due to memory issues. I think that trend will probably continue for a few more years (I think phones are in a similar position).
Granted, you can do a lot more with an Ipad than with the 1st generation of blackberry devices but being an owner of an iPad I can't think in somebody that would prefer to write an email or a blog entry in an iPad rather than in a computer.
The conclusion is clear: people are forgoing purchases of PCs because they are buying tablets.
You may think it's ridiculous, but the market is speaking loudly with the voice of billions of dollars, and any company which ignores that is doomed.
As I pointed out, this may not be because people are not using PCs, it just means that they aren't buying new PCs. Perhaps they find that an old, clunky computer is just fine for writing emails and so-forth and their tablets and smartphones are preferable for doing everything else. Or maybe they aren't satisfied with their technology choices at all but because they spent so much money on a tablet they have to delay any updates to their laptop/desktop machine for financial reasons.
Well correlation doesn't imply causation. (http://xkcd.com/552/) Sorry I couldn't help it :P
The thing I don't think your conclusion is necessarily true. I can understand that people just don't need to upgrade their PCs as often of they used to (I noticed that on my self too). In my case, I just don't need to upgrade and since Win 8 is running faster in the same old hardware I don't see that happening anytime soon.
But the true is that people is just wasting their money in something else. I wonder if that grow in the tablet market will decline now that new game consoles cycle is coming up.
This sounds like a hypothetical, right? My brother's laptop broke for a year, and he was fine on his phone until it was recently replaced.
I have a family with lots of eyeballs. Yes, there is still work requiring a PC and so every family should have one. But not every person in the family needs one.
Here's an edge case -- my parents' apartment community. This is a 2-building apartment complex (with about a dozen condo units in the front) with about 500ish total residents. When my folks sold their home a few years ago and moved in, no one else on their floor (two buildings, three floors each) owned a computer, and many never had owned one in the past. My parents today are still on the younger side of the spectrum (57 and 63), so we're talking about a population whose kids went off to college or moved out in 1992 or earlier.
However, there was a desire amongst people they met to own one as they were aware of what could be done, they just didn't want to deal with the hassle. My mother (a textbook technophobe) showed folks her Kindle, and people in the community felt that was easy enough to deal with (especially when getting to a library in the sticks can be a hassle). As a result, my parents helped get folks set up with 3G Kindles. My parents bought themselves iPad 2s about 18 months ago. My father, unlike my mother, was comfortable around computers, but his computer/iPad usage shifted to 10/90% after about 3 months. My mother was initially more 70/30, but is now more along the lines of 20/80. As of right now, they have no intention of replacing their computer with another one. Moreover, my mother who was always paranoid of someone "messing up" the family computer 15-20 years ago is eminently comfortable with her iPad. An even weirder outcome is she apparently follows Apple product news a bit, as do one or two of her aged 55-65 friends.
The new thing? The septuagenarians and octogenarians are now getting iPads. They're buying an Airport Express, calling Comcast to get internet access, and the iPad is the first computer they've ever owned. And they're pretty chuffed about it. And using them. Significantly. Do you have any idea how fantastic the idea of HD FaceTime is to grandparents who almost never get to see their grandkids (and that they'll use it every chance they get)? When I mentioned LetterPress to my mom, the next time I talked to her she mentioned how big a hit it was at her community.
I think to date my parents have set up a dozen other residents with Kindles and about another dozen so far with iPads + internet access. This number will continue to grow.
It's just that not everyone needs the full power and flexibility of a PC. I think in reality just a tiny fraction of users needs one, and as a number of users grows that percentage only lowers. The truth is that a PC always was and always will be much too hard for average user to operate (by design!) while not offering anything meaningful for said average user.
I suspect that tablets and other narrowly focused devices will only gain popularity with time, replacing PCs for most day to day tasks for most users. They are easy to use and they give people something of value without too much hassle. I welcome this trend with joy: it means less calls from family to help them set up/configure/uninstall/clean up things.
There is one thing, however, that I'd like to see included in this future of tablets and similar devices. It would be a tiny, protected with PIN, but mandatory on every single device icon which, when clicked/taped, would invoke a BASIC interpreter (or Lua, or anything similar). I'm worried that while it's getting easier for average user to use these devices, it's also getting harder and harder to hack them. And when there won't be a PC in a household anymore, how children are supposed to learn to love computing? Instead of just using devices...
Perhaps you tried the iWork applications from Apple that they sell for $10/each?
Compared to MS Office (my comparison is desktop MS Office; I haven't even seen its tablet version), they have fewer features (fewer than Mac OS X counterparts, which already have fewer features). Whether that is an issue for you depends on your requirements.
Major lacking features are the ability to handle large documents and macros. They also are worse in importing MS Office files than MS Office itself.
On an original iPad, they also are fairly sluggy. I wouldn't write large texts in Pages, for instance, or create large spreadsheets in Numbers. Reading and revising existing not-too-large files is OK, though.
On the plus side, they look better and are somewhat easier to use (although the iOS versions, IMO, suffer from the limited interface that tablets offer)
Integration with iCloud for document storage and synchronization is somewhat spotty, but IMO has gotten better recently (my experience is syncing to Mac OS X Numbers and Pages; I have never synced with Windows or with Office documents)
Android will dominate tablets for the same reason it is dominating smart phones. Android tablets will outsell the iPad five to one within a few years. The volume that Android tablets will bring to market will, however, remove volume from the laptop market.
If you look closely, the article was written by Business Insider[0], which is not what I would call a trustworthy source.
Except that Mac sales keep rising...
Look, I'm as bearish on MS as they come (I think Microsoft's cultural and technical dominance of the personal computer is at and end) but this is a whole lot of crap in an article.
I think Microsoft as being the "only" choice for personal computing is over, which is a net positive. But there are still tons of businesses (the people that really pay Microsoft gobs of money) that are not switching off of Microsoft any time soon. I think Google will nibble off a bit of Microsoft's services for the small and medium business (who needs Exchange any more unless you have strict auditing requirements, which most SMB's don't) and Apple will make inroads, but iPads won't be replacing shitty $500 Dells any time soon (although I know IT departments would love virus-free completely locked down computers; it's been their "Holy Grail" forever).
MSFT has seen declining Windows revenue as a proportion of the total for a while and will still have rev in the many tens of billions if even half of MSFT's consumer market disappears.
I don't think MSFT will ever go out of business. It'll just be smaller and a lot less relevant.
The Windows market is going to get nibbled (not gobbled - at least short term) from tablets in the consumer market and the corporate market is going to be increasingly web based for internal systems which over time will loosen the Windows grip there.
Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server can all remain major revenue drivers in the corporate world, they won't go anywhere quickly and they may even grow (I don't know the market well enough). IBM makes enough money in these markets.
Office is the big elephant, Excel is the tool for massive amounts of forecasting and modelling. Many people don't need the power and have alternatives but many do. PowerPoint strikes me as replaceable, most content created with it has a short lifespan. Word is replaceable for individual users but the network effect of people using it and exchanging files gives it hold.
Overall I think MS has a good decade or two of good profits if it wants to take them but the glory days are done.
This time, their two biggest competitors haven't made many mistakes at all, and that is their big problem.
Heck, Microsoft came to prominence only due to a huge misstep on the part of the IBM. Bill Gates simply exploited the opportunity like anyone with half a brain would in that situation.
Generally though I don't think that MS has the agility to capitalise on the mistakes that do happen. This still have massive scale and cash but everything I read about life in Microsoft says slow decline is the future. Over managed battling fiefdoms and bureaucracy that limit innovation and are likely to strangle any start up they buy.
http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/12/03/dear-microsoft-let-...
I actually don't think the MS nightmare is all that bad. I'm still seeing a lot of organizations try to move to Google Apps and then moving back to MS products because the lack of features and native functionality (Outlook is a big one). Even though I'm a heavy Apple user, I'm slightly rooting for MSFT.
Oh please, please stop this BS. The iPad sales are shooting up, true. The PC sales are going down, maybe true. But that could be due to several reasons - Maybe consumers are just 'upgrading' (like RAM, HDD, etc.) their existing PC's, or maybe existing PC owners don't want to even upgrade their PC at all because it's still working fine, there just could be a lot of reasons.
The statement that just the iPad alone eats the PC market is like saying, KFC is killing Ford's sales because it sells more chicken. Makes no sense, does it? Exactly, that's what the iPad vs PC comparison looks like too.
NO consumer would want to replace a PC with an iPad because there is a LOT of utility attached with a PC that it would be a blunder to replace it with a tablet like an iPad.
I assume it's leaning more and more towards tablets which really does imply that tablets (cough the iPad) is eating the PC.
My brother just tossed his laptop for an iPad and he loves it. There's one person who has, so you're already wrong.
Tablets are great for consumption, but extremely poor for generating content. Even with an external keyword, writing a document (not even talking about a spreadsheet) in a tablet is least than pleasant.
The OP just stated that word processing was harder on an iPad, which as we both know is simply an opinion.
Selection is just one example. Talk about dragging images within an editor - Most editors don't support the OnTouch event, but rather just the OnClick event, so there is a huge difference, actually.
This is an innovator's dilemma situation, where the incumbent technology (PCs) are delivering far more value than some users need. As such, "worse" technology (tablets, phones) are acceptable replacements for PCs for some of those users.
To you, that extra value is important, but many people just want Facebook, Email, Internet, etc. Those people are often totally happy with a device like an iPad that doesn't have as much overhead or complexity.
I can only believe you're writing this as "a lot of people" would, and not seriously...
Do you think comparing minicomputers to PCs makes any sense? Of course not, you can't compare those, PCs are mere toys compared to a minicomputer. Yet the minicomputer market (and DEC with it) is dead today.
What do most people spend most time doing on PCs? Web browsing, email, games, reading news and YouTube? All those things are well supported on tablets and for some they may be better suited to the tablet.
Sure the PC is better for development and serious writing but that is only a fraction of usage and writing doesn't need a very modern computer (or Windows 8).
Do you know many real people?
I don't know what you mean by 'reveal IP addresses', but I can assure you that your latter statement is very much not the case.
More on the X-Originating-IP header, from 2001: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/06/44567
As for whether or not Gmail reveals your IP address, it depends on who's asking. E.g., we have the recent example of LTC Paula Broadwell.
Yeah, so Google is more than willing to do this too (and has, in the past).
Edit: I'm not saying I want this. As a user of all of these services (except MySpace) I like them the way they are. But if I were Microsoft CEO this is what I would do.
They've also got more design talent than they probably know what to do with.
I do think that they should find something to do with the Xbox/media centre platform where some of your suggestions might apply.
As much as Microsoft have pissed off game developers and failed to lower the entry bar compared to iOS, console competitors like Nintendo and Sony are struggling a lot, which could put Microsoft in a much better position.
Not one of these suggestions would move the needle for Microsoft at all.
Pandora/Spotify are bleeding money because of the royalty structure. It's maybe a coin toss if the rates will change. A matter the congress can decide. I think it's worth the gamble. Plus they could leverage this on Xbox too as well as phones.
These businesses aren't that profitable which is why I think it makes sense to buy them. Microsoft if they bought all these companies (and if the SEC would allow) would greatly expand their ad network and open up possibilities for new integrations and businesses. Every other major tech company (Google, Amazon, Apple) has audio/video. Microsoft should want to compete too. I don't see MS Word and being able to run EXEs as enough reason to go Microsoft. I'm imagining them unlocking a wholly integrated entertainment setup.
Also, I see MySpace being what it once was. A place to friend all the weird and interesting strangers and follow new bands. It was great for that and a lot of fun. Social networks weren't all serious like they were before Facebook and LinkedIn.
"Windows Phone will become a viable 3rd choice behind iPhone and Android"
Really? Did anyone actually expect a product that came to market so late, with no OEM buy-in, to be successful?
"Windows 8 will re-establish PC dominance"
MS has an established track record for releasing a hit version of Windows, then a flop, then a hit, etc. Windows 7 was a hit. It's hardly scientific, but most of the people I spoke with expected Win8 to flop simply based on that pattern.
MS is only in dire trouble in relation to the overly-optimistic predictions Y!F made last year. In reality, they're continuing to lose ground as they have been for years. Yes, Ballmer's leadership is still questionable, but it's hardly like they've had a terrible year. They're just continuing to slip and lose dominance.
When you buy into a closed ecosystem, you buy a product that comes with a leash attached to your neck. Because of compatibility issues, you pay now and set yourself up to also pay more later. You agree to give a vendor near monopolistic powers over you in the future. You will have to continue buying from their ecosystem unless you are willing to lose access to all your apps and a lot of your media or buy them all again.
Microsoft does this, RIM does this and of course Apple is the worst offender. A lot of consumers do not want OSs that tie a leash around their necks.
Apple being first to achieve wide success in the market of phones with near desktop level computing power are able to maintain a big share of the market because of a large population already locked in its platform.
RIM and Microsoft's mobile OSs, judged on technical merits, are probably as good as Android and iOS. However, Android has the huge benefit of not locking users and developers with a particular hardware or software vendor.
I'm pretty sure that if Android was not a mostly open OS it would not have gained more traction than the others. I'm also pretty sure that if iOS was released as an open platform, there would be no significant competitors other than iOS forks. Google and its Android partners know this as does Amazon to a lesser extent (although they force DRM on a lot of their content including apps).
In the long run, the only conclusion to this war that makes sense is convergence toward competing Android forks that allow people to change vendors or coalitions of vendors without losing all compatibility with their accumulated apps and media. That is unless the others are willing to open their OSs and allow competing forks like Android does.
tl;dr: The medical sector is entrenched in ancient Windows-based software, but the backwards compatibility of Windows 8 will allow them to move from desktop computers to Surfaces (tablets, if you will).
Or maybe it might have some significance. I have no idea what the numbers are, but I assume a couple of the people here trying to disrupt the market could give us the low-down.
More disastrously for Microsoft, who needs a PC to make PowerPoints? Keynote will kill Microsoft.
Particularly the slashed OS price, and bundling of the previous cash cow, Office, in RT.
Agree it might take time to catch on, but these days that doesn't seem to be a truth either. Windows Phone looked like a sure winner to me a year ago - or, atleast, more than its current 1%.
Things are moving fast, and people have broadened their minds in the past 3 years of iPad exposure.
What MS needed was a product that took the iPad by the horns. Either that or released its Surface "compromise" (which it certainly is) 2 years ago.
Those at school who have one are very positive about it now, so the market share in this may still grow a lot. I would not think for two seconds about Windows on my phone a few years ago, but I would consider a Windows phone right now because they got so much better.
The reason people used to throw away their working PCs to buy new ones was newer better hardware and hyped up new OS releases. I think PC sales decline is greatly contributed by no new compelling hardware factor. The OS releases of course are less and less compelling because most tasks happens in browser which works fine even on old PCs. If IE was only game in town, people would perhaps still need to get new OS but that's not the case anymore.
I guess we are entering new era of PC/Mac refresh cycles were people are going to replace their machines only when it stops working instead of just because new release arrived. People would rather spend $500 on getting a tablet that they don't have than replacing their PC that is already working fine to check emails and browse the web.
Interesting thing here is that Wall street analysts would probably going to extrapolate this incorrectly instead of seeing that this is new "normal".
What it is true is that we don't need new hardware in the same way we used to. For instance, my 5 years old laptop is running faster with Win8 beta that it did with Win 7, and that is the only PC I use at home and probably that won't change any time soon. Before that I used to change PCs in a two years cycle.
I know that everything my wife does on her current laptop (running Ubuntu) she could do just as well on a Chromebook, so when her current laptop kicks the bucket, my first choice for a replacement would be a Chromebook, in which case it would be first laptop I've bought that does not have Windows pre-installed.
Taking my circle, several of my family have migrated to iPad or android tablets from PC/laptop setups and are not looking back because iPad fulfills all there computing needs. For me, my laptop recently passed away so I bought a nexus 7 to replace it, and you know what its brilliant for me. I do obviously still have a development PC, but for personal use its tablet all the way. So I think desktops and PC sales will suffer loss long term in the consumer market. So Microsoft do need a good product here, and they have a lot of catch up to do, but they have done it before!
The security blanket for Microsoft remains new innovation enterprise, business and maybe cloud. I think they have a long way to go to win back the consumer space.
Seriously though, I can't believe I actually just read this entire "article". There's no proof of anything, just a whole bunch of over-exaggerated claims. Does the author really think that people in offices are going to ditch computers entirely and type 15 page documents on a device that has glass so weak if you sneeze on it you risk cracking the screen? No USB ports, so means for connecting multiple external monitors, no CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive, no means of connecting an external drive, lack of internal space, no keyboard...
I feel sorry for any business that thinks it's a great idea to stop using PC's and instead opt for expensive tablets with a minimal feature set, investing in potentially tens of thousands of dollars in software and infrastructure to support an office of iPads is not feasible. You know why PC's are the number choice for most businesses, especially in the corporate sector? Because PC's are dirt cheap, cheap to build and upgrade, cheaper software, better support. I've had my Core i5 machine for ages now and I've been able to run games on the highest settings since I built it 2 or 3 years ago. RAM is cheap, new hard drives are cheap, every component of a computer except the CPU is cheap. You can't upgrade the internals of an iPad.
As for Office, even Google Docs and Zoho (amongst others) have failed to beat it. Microsoft Office isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future and the very fact Microsoft have launched cloud versions of Office as well, it's definitely still in wide use and evolving. There are many people who still don't trust the cloud, I don't trust the cloud.
It was a nice try, but this is ridiculous. Windows 8 has been out for one month and the author is making extraordinary claims that it has failed to stop the iPad? Windows 8 is not about just capturing the tablet market, it's a great decision from Microsoft to streamline their operating system offering instead of having 15 different versions of an operating system there's only a couple.
Remember when journalism used to mean researching and spending sometimes weeks or months on one story? Me either. It's all become a race to get page views to increase ad revenues as evident by this article.
I work with about 10 developers, not a single one has even mentioned trying Windows 8 or VS 2012. We all have our own MSDN licenses so it's not a money issue. Everything we do runs on .NET, SQL Server, Windows Server, etc, and it runs well, it's just no one seems to care about the new stuff. I stopped getting excited about MS stuff maybe about 2 years ago but that's because I became an OSS snob, that's not what's happening to the otherwise happy MS stack devs I know, I'm not really sure what it is.
"The iPhone business is now bigger and more profitable than all of Microsoft"
I still remember the interview in which Balmer outrighted laughed at the iPhone.
That's not happening.