Fujitsu Not Pleased With Windows 8 Demand, Either | Hacker News Reader

Fujitsu Not Pleased With Windows 8 Demand, Either

allthingsd.com

25 pointsmtgx51 comments

Honestly, I'm surprised there are still as many Windows OEMs as there are right now. The consumer PC market has cratered since the iPad, and Apple's tactic of getting Macs into colleges is paying dividends now those students are moving into their 30s. How many people really want a Windows machine at this point? With Valve's aggressive move into taking PC games off of Windows altogether, I really don't know what market segment is left loyal to the platform.

Samsung might be taking a hit on experiments such as Chromebooks, but my guess is its going to be the OEMs that diversify quickly and focus on quality and not quantity that will stay in the business of selling computational machines to consumers.

Windows 8 is Microsoft's parting gift to the desktop. I'd put money on Windows 9 going Metro only, and perhaps a revival of the NT brand for enterprise buyers to keep the desktop around.

My god, some of you people live in the weirdest little bubble, where you have no idea what is going on in the world.

> The consumer PC market has cratered since the iPad

No it hasn't. Not even close. There are a lot more PCs sold per quarter than iPads, and the rate of PC shipments is still increasing.

> How many people really want a Windows machine at this point?

According to every available stat, a vast majority of people choose Windows over Linux and OSX.

> With Valve's aggressive move into taking PC games off of Windows altogether

Valve's biggest market by far is PC, and will remain so for the immediate future. They have no intention of moving off Windows - just establishing other platforms.

> I'd put money on Windows 9 going Metro only

I will take this bet for any odds you are willing to give. The fact that you are even considering this as a possible outcome shows that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

> the rate of PC shipments is still increasing.

Gartner and IDC: PC shipments tumbled over 8 percent in Q3[1]

That's the second consecutive quarter of negative global growth.[2]

>> The consumer PC market has cratered since the iPad

> There are a lot more PCs sold per quarter than iPads

I don't think 'since the iPad' meant losing out solely to iPad sales.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/10/gartner-and-idc-pc-shipme...

[2] http://www.consumerit.eu/index.php?option=com_content&vi...

So the quarter before a major new Windows OS release, the number of computers sold decreased? Earth shattering

You're grasping at straws, Windows is not going anywhere in a hurry. You may not like it, but to ignore this fact is to ignore reality.

I guess you missed the part where demand for this hugely anticipated OS release is looking decidedly weak?[0][1][2]

(I love that after telling one person they don't know what they're talking about, while making obviously false claims yourself, you continue to lecture about 'reality'.)

BTW, I'm not posting in support of Lewisham's thesis, so I have no need for straws.

[0] TFA

[1] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/12/03/Why-Window...

[2] http://news.investors.com/technology/101612-629557-intel-bea...

> while making obviously false claims yourself

What claims have I made that are false?

So after a couple of weak quarters, PC sales are what, twice the rate of tablets? 3 times?

Go ahead, try to pretend that Windows is no longer relevant - but if you want to actually understand the market, which is what I thought this website was for, then you can't support ridiculous claims like "Windows PC sales have cratered since the iPad was released".

> What claims have I made that are false?

You said they're growing. They're shrinking.

I'm out.

They shrunk in one quarter. There are some early indications that by some measures they might have shrunk in Q4 as well. You know full well that the statement you are trying to defend, that "Windows 8 PC sales have cratered since the iPad" is indefensible.

I know I said I was done but since you keep harping on the point, I'll just leave this here:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/...

It shows global PC sales flat since the start of 2010. The iPad debuted in April 2010.

I'm downvoting you because your tone is unnecessarily hostile. You are making a defensible point. You don't need to be so caustic to do it, nor simply ignore what points people are making in return; there are far more potent arguments available to you than just trying to pretend noibl didn't score a legitimate point by pointing out the market is indeed shrinking when you said growing, and then trying to sneak the goalposts somewhere else.

Maybe I was too hostile, but Nobl was trying to move the goalposts himself from the initial "Windows PC sales have cratered since the iPad", to "PC sales have shrunk in the latest quarter". I was getting annoyed and trying to bring it back to the original point.

So that would have been a decent theory before the Windows 8 release. But if people were delaying purchases because of the upcoming Windows 8 release, there should have been a sales spike by now as all that pent-up demand gets satisfied. And the impression I'm getting from the news (including the original article) doesn't support such a spike...

How many people really want a Windows machine at this point?

You know, it's funny that your id says that you're studying video games and yet you make such a bold statement. Anyone who's into serious gaming wants a Windows machine. Duh!

Anyone who wants to make money building and selling video games wants an iPad. Not all games sold are hardcore, which is somewhat of a difficult capital-intensive market anyways.

Many people into serious gaming are not necessarily on the PC platform. The other aspect is that the majority of those that are are buying into the Steam ecosystem. As I said in my OP, I expect those players will follow Valve away from Windows to Linux if Valve courts them (and developers) aggressively.

> How many people really want a Windows machine at this point? With Valve's aggressive move into taking PC games off of Windows altogether, I really don't know what market segment is left loyal to the platform.

Given that Windows still holds > 91% of the OS market share [1], I don't think it is going to fade away anytime soon.

> I'd put money on Windows 9 going Metro only

That is never going to happen, given how much influence Microsoft has on the corporate world, it would be equivalent killing their golden goose.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows#Usage_share

Regarding sales as opposed to usage:

Windows once held an overwhelming lead in 2008 with about 70 percent of the OS market, Forrester found in estimating overall personal computing device sales by OS. By 2012, that market share had shrunk to about 30 percent.

-- http://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/10/22/microsoft-os-market-sl...

According to a Goldman Sachs report acquired by The Seattle Times, Windows lost massive share in the global compute market-- from being the OS of choice in 97% of all computing devices in 2000 to just 20% in 2012.

-- http://www.consumerit.eu/index.php?option=com_content&vi...

That's hilarious - "all computing devices" includes tablets, and even some smartphones. No wonder desktop Windows is "declining" in popularity against that whole market.

It's not desktop Windows. It's Windows.

See my posts re declining PC sales for why this would matter (hint: people are getting work done on devices).

Then we can fall back to the argument that consumer PCs aren't really important anyway.

People are using tablets for what they used to use PC's for in the past. My mom can do everything on her iPad: e-mail, surf the net, take and look at baby photos of my daughter. In 2000 she had a Windows PC, but she's unlikely to ever buy one again. To the extent that it's not Windows running on those tablets, that represents a real loss in market share for Windows.

> That is never going to happen, given how much influence Microsoft has on the corporate world, it would be equivalent killing their golden goose.

You stopped reading when you read the sentence you wanted to read. I wrote:

Windows 8 is Microsoft's parting gift to the desktop. I'd put money on Windows 9 going Metro only, and perhaps a revival of the NT brand for enterprise buyers to keep the desktop around.

Enterprise will be given something, but I don't think it will be Windows 9. It'll be something else, maybe a new fork from Windows 7.

How much of this is being driven by issues with Windows 8 versus people simply being content with what they already have? The core 2 duo era killed the buy-a-new-computer-every-2-years thing. I think that, not tablets, is the new reality MS and friends have to realize.

That people are no longer purchasing new computers every two years sounds very likely, but I think Microsoft (though not their partners) has realised this already. That's why they've been pushing the new "design language" so hard, to the point of including it on non-tablets where it (arguably) doesn't belong.

At least among the people around me, the money which would previously be spent on a new computer is used to buy a tablet (mainly iPad) instead. While I'm not sure if the way Microsoft is approaching the tablet-market is right, I don't think they're wrong if they're betting on tablets overtaking desktop/laptop computers in a not so distant future.

I don't think they're wrong if they're betting on tablets overtaking desktop/laptop computers in a not so distant future.

Sigh. Yes, when that future includes cerebral neuroimplants, tablets will replace desktop PCs. Until then, that's as ridiculous a notion as believing that tractors will replace steam shovels, or that motorcycles will replace cars.

Touchscreens, and by extension tablets, are not useful for desktop computing. It ranges from amusing to mildly annoying when people in online comment threads believe otherwise, but it's a cause for full-blown market panic when Microsoft executives believe otherwise.

"Touchscreens, and by extension tablets, are not useful for desktop computing. It ranges from amusing to mildly annoying when people in online comment threads believe otherwise..."

I can't tell for sure if it's what you are implying, but I don't believe tablets comes close to replacing desktop computers in terms of functionality, nor do I think they should be used for "desktop computing".

However, I believe they have the potential to cover the needs of most people. Saying that tablet-sales will overtake other kinds of devices, and saying that tablets are fully capable of replacing such devices are very different things.

True, I think I see where you're coming from, in that your use of "overtaking" wasn't synonymous with "replacing." I'm mostly making fun of the Windows 8 school of thought that argues that tablet and desktop usage patterns are similar enough to warrant a one-size-fits-all GUI.

I think tablets are a threat to a large portion of the laptop PC market, but laptops have already replaced desktops in most applications that can benefit from portability. If someone is using a desktop, chances are they need a desktop, running an OS that's well-suited to it.

I can see that my usage of "overtaking" was quite ambiguous, sorry about that. I also realise that I may have come off as positive to the path Microsoft is heading with Windows 8. This is not the case, as I do not think the "Metro"-style UI belongs on a desktop computer or that desktop computers should be used the same way you use a tablet.

With that said, you make a good point about laptops and I should probably not consider them to be equally threatened in this situation, the way I did in my first post.

Yes. Large numbers of home users use their PC for email, Facebook, browsing/shopping, and maybe skype/Facetime. Tablets are perfectly good for that and easy to use while sitting on the couch. Those users are likely never again buying a standard desktop or laptop.

Kids will grow up on iPads and might...perhaps...graduate to macbooks when they go off to college. Then they'll use a PC at work and come home at night to their tablets/devices...

Alas, there will be no one to program these PCs/devices in the future because kids won't grow up with code capable environments (well, maybe they'll be able to code on the web ala Kahn's academy).

No, it's more like Chinese manufacturing replacing American manufacturing. Yes, we still build a lot of sophisticated stuff here, but we build simple things like garments in China and those jobs aren't coming back. We don't even really produce less than we used to, but it's not a growth industry even though it grew hugely in the last 30 years because all that growth was captured by China.

A tablet (maybe with a keyboard dock) can replace PC's for a huge amount of the type of work people used to do on home PC's. E-mail, surfing the net, movies, music, chat, photos, typing up school papers etc, are all that is needed by a large portion of computer users. People are still going to have their work PC's, but the size of that industry is going to shrink relative to the overall market for personal computing devices.

Recently I replaced my old video card on my PC, the old one had something like 160 core while new one has 960. I plugged it in and nothing really noticeable has improved. Same with when I swapped my HDD's out for SSD's. In contrast when I was a kid, there was a night & day difference going from an old Apple ][e to a 286 chipset.

But I also believe that Apple's gouged out a large chunk of customers via ipads and osx based computers.

There's also the question of what is wrong with Windows 7 for anyone to leave it? I can't find supporting numbers right now, but how many years did it take for XP's user base to abandon it?

Additionally Valve is starting to prop up linux's weakest sales point and make the consumer friendly distro's gamer friendly.

I guess my overall point is that a lot of little bites and not one main culprit is responsible for eroding Microsoft's market share.

"Same with when I swapped my HDD's out for SSD's."

That's... pretty astonishing.

Yeah, honestly the difference between HDD and SSD was bigger for non games uses than my computer upgrades in the 90's.

A decade earlier I was into DIY car performance. I had a Nissan 180sx that was at ~220WHP and slowly tuned/modified it until it was at 380-400WHP. The car could easily kill it's driver if they weren't careful because it was really damn fast. At that point, there were no more easy modifications and gains were in the variable/dubious 10-15WHP that would only be noticeable if I ran the car on a timed trial or a dyno.

How this correlates to my HDD to SSD experience is that my workstation is already fairly optimized ( not overclocked mind you ), so biggest improvement was possibly in random seek and since I don't run MySQL or any other server system on the computer that does thousands of file op's/second the improvement was relatively marginal.

Have you actually tried anything other than the desktop? What software did you use to gauge the power of this new graphics card?

Agreed. Still, Microsoft still deserves some blame for failing to offer reasons to upgrade. For example, they could have been improving resolution independence in Windows and encouraging high-DPI displays instead of 1366x768 dreck. Or they could have taken the correct observation that overlapping windows are often confusing, and rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater via Metro, come up with some sort of automatic tiling window manager that lets you effectively take advantage of large screens. Instead they've deliberately sacrificed desktop usability in favor of tablets, and are surprised that people aren't flocking to it.

Windows Vista had tiling somewhat hidden away (you had to use ctrl and select 2 windows in the taskbar, right click and select 'tile horizontally/vertically'), and in 7 it's hidden even further (you have to open up task manager, hold ctrl, right click, and tile).

It was there, just not particularly well implemented. I've seen some really good Linux tiling WMs, as well as extensions for GNOME that make tiling simple, I can't understand why Microsoft is incapable of doing the same.

I've been running Win 8 on my home machine since it was available on MSDN. I went through the initial headache and then my old habits were replaced by new ones and I was just as productive again.

But, guess what. I recently realized that the reason I have no problems with the new menu is because I've managed to completely avoid it! For a little background, I'm a C# dev so I use VS 2012. I'm also an avid gamer. But there are times where I won't open the new menu at all for a couple of weeks. I'm not sure how I feel about this...

I'm generally optimistic about things from Microsoft, but this one has me puzzled. I don't think it's a negative thing, it just feels like a feature that's sort of "just there".

Edit - As far as I understand, it is required to use Windows 8 to develop Win 8 apps. So basically its only use so far is a dev sandbox.

For the power user -

Windows 7 - press start key and type the name of the program you want to start, get a list of matching apps in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Windows 8 - press start key and type the name of the program you want to start, get a list of matching apps in the middle of the screen.

Windows 7 - pin all your most common apps to the dock, and press Win-# (where # is the 1-based index of the app you want in the dock) to launch it.

Windows 8 - ???

Exactly. If you think the Windows 8 fullscreen start menu is getting in your way, it means you haven't yet learned how to use Windows 8. For a professional user this should take a matter of days, or even hours/minutes.

I don't doubt Win 8 demand is "weak", but I understand that app store activity for paid apps more than doubled after Christmas. So I suspect that a better measure will be to see where we are in January after all the folks who got new PCs and other Win 8 paraphernalia begin to be counted.

Not to mention, unlike the reaction to Vista, I don't hear folks asking for their machines to be retrograded. IOW a reaction of - I may not hurry up to upgrade, but I'm also not going to go out of my way to avoid it.

Obviously just my .02 on the matter.

I haven't piled on the Win8 hate bandwagon in the past, but I'm actually liking it less the more I use it. The start screen, while not as terrible as some say, has not proved useful in any way for non-touch devices and is at best an annoyance. Microsoft have clearly gone out of their way to make it more difficult than before to switch away from the default Bing/IE combo (the latest annoyance is that "Microsoft Update" uses a hardcoded link to IE instead of your default browser, and IE nags you to change your default browser once it's open). For DirectX development Microsoft has downgraded their SDK by adding non-optional integration with Visual Studio and charging money for parts that used to be free (PIX); plus they removed the DX9 debug runtime so it's harder to debug DX9 apps.

If I was going to reinstall Windows right now, I definitely would choose Windows 7 over 8. There's nothing in 8 that's a must-have for desktop use, and there are many things about 8 that are more annoying than 7. Plus, hardware/app compabitility with 8 is still spotty (I've had a lot of problems with Boot Camp).

I've been trying to avoid moaning about win8 too because I came pretty late to the party and I get the feeling it's talked out. But like you, I get more annoyed the more I use it . The start screen is tolerable (though I never use it), but I find the "swipe" gesturing and charms bar very irritating. And more irritating still, I find the fact that there's no obvious way to turn them off just obnoxious.

That sounds like people were just more likely to buy apps around Christmas, like I'm sure happened on all platforms.

I guess my experience is a little unusual. I went to check out and possibly buy one of the new Surface tablets. But next to it was an Asus laptop, about the same size as the tablet, with a touch screen, and a real keyboard. All for $499. A Surface, with the add-on keyboard that seemed a bit flimsy, cost more. The laptop seemed pretty sturdy.

So I bought the laptop. I like having a laptop with the touchscreen interface.

Win8 now includes a pdf reader. But it bizarrely does not remember the last page read, and there's no way to go directly to page 147 without hitting the arrow key 146 times, making it a real pain to read books with it.

That's probably my main complaint with Win8 :-)

I haven't touched a Windows 8 machine, but the TV commercials make Windows 8 look foreign and unlike anything I already know how to use.

I view it as a Windows 8 ninja rapidly switching between all sorts of tasks I vaguely understand, and the relationship between the gesture and the computer's response seems hard to follow.

Maybe the OS is really easy to use, but their marketing would make me think twice before buying a Windows 8 machine.

>I view it as a Windows 8 ninja rapidly switching between all sorts of tasks I vaguely understand, and the relationship between the gesture and the computer's response seems hard to follow.

I find this aspect of Win8 (switching between Modern UI mode and desktop mode) bafflingly, appallingly bad. It's one of the shortcoming that personally affects me the least (because I never find myself needing to use Modern UI mode), but it is undoubtedly one of the most egregious design decisions.

In a recent conversation with my dad, the archetypal non-computer-guy, he said he wanted a computer with "idiot mode". The problem with win8 is that, while it has the simplified modern UI mode, I can't see it being comprehensive enough for really anyone's computing needs. So you end up switching back and forth between regular and modUI, which for a user like my dad is just a usability nightmare. Switching between both modes is vastly more complex than using either mode exclusively, but you're virtually forced into switching, at least occasionally. I mean, having chrome and IE installed on the same machine is a bit of a stretch to begin with, but when you have two versions of each browser, it's break-down-in-tears laughably bad.

I'm reminded of Larry Tesler's famous "no modes" activism [1] which I first heard about in Bret Victor's truly excellent "Inventing on Principle" presentation. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler

[2] http://vimeo.com/36579366

No, you feel that way because that's actually how it is. This guy described a lot of the problems with Windows 8 and he is pretty spot on (although he does exaggerate a bit in some cases):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo

I haven't watched the whole video but I'm on his first point which is "Control" (or rather the lack of it) which he says is his biggest issue with Windows 8.

His example was that he tried to google how to do something and he was launched into the weather app. His accompanying screenshot was that of the charms bar with search and he typed in the word Barcelona AND selected the third option for him (which is the weather app). He spends the next 40 seconds talking about "goblin farts".

I mean seriously .... what kind of garbage critique is that ?

He is not even close to "being spot on" from the first ten minutes of the video and I doubt I should even bother watching the last ten minutes.

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