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Comment by jake_D | Hacker News Reader

Businesses work on desktops and active directories. WinRT makes no sense on the desktop, and it offers no AD.

So MS has nothing to offer here, B2B wise.

They made a huge mistake, pretending that desktops and mobile devices are the same beast. And they're gonna pay for it, in sales and market value. At the end of 2013, they should be a even less relevant than today.

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> At the end of 2013, they should be a even less relevant than today.

At the moment, Microsoft own slightly less than 100% of the enterprise desktop market. At the end of 2013 they will almost certainly own slightly less than 100% of the enterprise desktop market.

You live in a bubble.

True. But also at the end of 2013 even more employees will be bringing their own devices - phones and tablets to work so they don't have the enterprise lap top. These devices will run Android and iOS in a roughly 50/50 share of OS distribution.

The enterprise supports the work their employees need to do by giving them the traditional desktop tools - this is Microsofts market and always has been. But more and more those tools are overkill for the job the employee needs to accomplish so they are turning to the tools that work for them in their personal lives.

Very few people in the enterprise are going to stop using their Windows desktop/laptop, they are just going to supplement it with their phone/tablet - at least in 2013 anyway. People have been doing that for over a decade with Blackberrys.

Anecdote 1: I see iPads on trains to London as often as I see Thinkpads (and the odd Dell) now. That was not the case a few years ago. Trains to London arriving before 9am are pure business I can assure you (£130 return second class). A few Mac laptops in first class, solid Thinkpad/iPad and blue shirt territory in 2nd.

Anecdote 2: The middle managers where I work all have iPads and shared access to desktop PCs. They are using an rdp client on the iPads for access to some business applications. This has happened over the last two years.

Anecdote 3: Most people visiting my place of work to specify systems (heating; photocopying; interior decoration; networking; compliance with various standards) now have iPads. That has happened in the last 18 months.

No hard stats but I have noticed this change.

What industry do you work in? I have not yet seen (in London) a single work-issued iPad. I've seen one or two people who have brought their own in to work, but they don't do anything more with it that check email and read a few word documents.

I've also never seen anyone on a train use an iPad for anything that looked like work. There are loads of them, but everyone is playing games, reading news etc.

My anecdotal experience is that BYOD iPads are talked about a lot, but it very rarely seems to actually happen - just a handful of upper management types, who usually struggle to open up a pdf on the thing.

Just anecdotal: what I see each morning as I walk past the London train. You are probably right, perhaps there is a bias on the sample.

I work in education. Middle managers entering data on an iPad is easier in a classroom with 30+ people milling around - no need to sit. They do email and access RDP on them as well. There was tablet use before from years ago for similar reasons.

I don't know what the people on the train are doing, but it looks like corporate applications. Not shopping or video. Some reading and annotating of PDFs. I don't want to start shoulder surfing!

The advice/late train people at the station now use iPads to display timetable info as well by the way. They move to where the slightly confused knot of passengers left by the train that broke down are, instead of getting them to queue up. Seems a sensible use of a tablet given the cost of a person.

Let's see. To the businesses, MS has nothing substantially new or exciting to offer.

True, desktop usage will probably remain about the same (with a slight decline), but meanwhile, the mobile computing world is growing rapidly, with MS being largely out of the picture.

Desktop OSes will continue to sale, but they become day-by-day a very small fragment of the OSes out there. Win7 is a great OS, but I'm sure various alternatives, coming from the mobile world and leveraging their success there, will try to replace it.

I love Windows (7), use Visual Studio and other Microsoft tools daily, but this has nothing to do with the real changes that occur in the tech world.

MS bet wrong, and as occurs in the free market, they'll lose.

None of what you just said, regardless of whether it is true or not, changes the fact that Microsoft are incredibly relevant, and will continue to be for the immediate future.

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