Sometimes in the startup world with all the glowing Apple logos, we lose sense of the rest of the world (heck, even the rest of the United States).
Microsoft no longer has the mind share of either the public or the development community. The "cool kids" tend not to develop on MS platforms these days by choice. Look at Jeff Atwood, he was a prominant asp.net mvc dev (stackoverflow) and he has chosen to use rails for his next project (discourse). This trend is all the more troublesome because C# is really a fanstastic language. But the downsides of being tied to the Windows/MSSQL/IIS platform is like have a boat anchor around your ankle. Similarly, how many people are excited about windows 8 vs. iOS or android?
Also, look at Microsoft's big pushes, bing and winphone 7+. Both have been at best partial successes, and they need more than that for a company their size.
The exact moment in time that is the biggest problem for a company facing potential decline like Microsoft is not when they have ceded the majority of marketshare to a competitor, nor is it when their revenues and marketshare being to contract. The key moment is the inflection point in their growth rate, when the 2nd derivative turns from positive to negative. That's the point where if nothing is done then eventually the peak will be reached and decline will set in. That's the point where there is still the opportunity to turn things around, it's the point where the resources are still available and the least work needs to be done to make a change.
Great times for Xamarin.
Just last week I downloaded the MonoTouch toolkit and will experiment a bit with creating a multi-platform (iOS / Android) app with a partially shared codebase in C#. So far I like the following things about the MonoTouch toolkit:
a) UIKit methods / classes are called more or less the same. Don't need to look up the API much.
b) from what I understand, it should be possible to create my own wrappers around Obj-C (iOS) or Java (Android) objects.
c) Create optimised user interfaces for each platform. This is the part where the code will differ mostly.
d) MonoDevelop is a nice, though somewhat sparse / limited IDE. I really hate the future creep of Eclipse and imo Visual Studio could also use a little trimming in the UI - otherwise a fine product though. I love Xcode.
Regarding your point about MonoDevelop, I won't spill the beans but Xamarin is preparing something exciting to fix IDE problems right now.
Fwiw he went with Rails for Discourse because the entire stack has to be both free as in beer, and Free as in liberty, since it's competing against phpbb and the like, which are both f/Free and good enough for most people.
For Discourse to take off in the way he wants it to, he can't risk relying on better features to compensate for cost differential, he has to eliminate cost differential.
If he were building another SO or closed-source SaaS product, asp.net mvcc would probably still be an option.
Apple's made no real moves to become more corporate friendly in the desktop space (and things like their recent blocking of Java definitely won't help them) and Linux on the corporate desktop is miles away from adoption (some public bodies which did adopt it have moved back to Windows).
People talk about the new era of tablet computing, but tablets are pretty much useless for a lot of typing-heavy work. Perhaps eventually a descendant of the tablet (perhaps something like the chromebook) will start to dislodge windows for lighter-weight corporate usage, but I believe it'll be a long time coming. Most large companies have piles of weird internal web-based tools which can't deal with touch, perhaps run on Java or Flash or depend on IE6 technologies, and the slow and cumbersome process of replacing them will take an age.
Edit: to clarify, right now we're at a point where it's rare for a tablet (or smartphone) to be someone's primary or only computing device, but as they become more popular that will increasingly be the case, and then people will develop new habits and new modes of use to fit these devices into their work or their lives. Meaning that if people are using them at work then they'll tend to have some way to use a physical keyboard with them for the times when an onscreen keyboard won't cut it.
Ten years ago, almost everyone's computing time was spent on Windows. Now even people who use Windows desktops/laptops have iPads, Android phones, etc.
It's not a natural first option for writing documents if you're on a device which already has Google Docs, Polaris Office, Kingsoft Office or anything like that.
In fact, most people will probably never even consider it an option. At least not until Microsoft provides a native version of Office for their preferred procrastination platform.
And kids growing up these days spend more (most?) of their time on mobile devices, running iOS or Android, or when on a laptop, 99% of the time in a browser.
The time when people grew up and learnt Microsoft by default is definitely over. These days you can actually grow up, learn computers and internet without ever once using Microsoft software. It's not that far fetched.
This is Microsoft's problem. They can no longer claim to be the one default everyone knows, uses and are familiar with (and hence prefer).
In 2012Q3, 122 million Android devices were sold http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57549482-94/smartphone-sale...
Over the same time period, about 75 million PCs and laptops were sold, mostly running Windows.
Android is already beating Windows in terms of rate at which devices are shipped running it. If people start using Android devices for more stuff, and consequently use Windows devices less, Microsoft is in big trouble.
Go in to any office, literally, any office, and you won't find anyone working on an iPad or their Samsung Galaxy, they will be working on a PC or a laptop, most likely running Windows and for the most part they are happy with it.
Comparing the sales of Windows against the sales of Android is like comparing the sales of Toasters against the sales of Microwaves, sure, they might be at some level similar appliances but they are used for completely different reasons.
A smartphone is used for consumption, it is a luxury most people have or aspire to have and while the PC or Laptop may fall in to that department at home, in the office, they are used for creation (except from when we are bored of course...) and for the foreseeable future, that's how things will remain until the space is completely "disrupted" (whatever that means.)
I'm going to put it like this, I don't live in Silicone Valley, I live in a small town in the north of the UK, and every person I know and who's house I have been to. Every single one has both a smart phone and a PC, that's not just me saying it, that's every single person.
The reason why the numbers are so different is something crucial and so simple that we always seem to overlook it:
Normal people[1] only need one computer for their home and they share it, but they want to be in contact with their family via phones at all times, and the kids these days don't want a Nokia 3310, they want the newest, most expensive model, because they are COOL.
You can attribute it to whatever merely visible swing in the market you want to, but that is the simple truth.
[1] - By which I mean people who aren't in the tech industry.
Once this transition has been completed, MS will become a Software company like all the others, they won't have any home turf advantage anymore.
For this reason I'm very skeptical whether MS will allow the Office port. It would basically show that they have accepted their fate (which would be a good sign for their management however).
They either use a tablet, or their smartphone if the tablet isn't nearby! So the key here is convenience, which incidentally is why the laptop became so popular in the consumer market. When that PC dies, they will take a hard look at whether they really need to replace it.
The fraction of worldwide workforce that sits in an office doing work that requires both a keyboard and a screen larger than 10" includes about any office-person whose actual output is not just talking...
Windows is everywhere, but Microsoft only gets money when they sell a new version. New computers are cheaper and cheaper, so they have to lower Windows price also.
The mobile market is enormous and MS missed it (so far), but the desktop/laptop market isn't going away any time soon and they seem to be missing that, too.
Windows is a good desktop environment for the most part. But by trying to make Windows a monolith on all platforms, they seem to be rushing towards making it suboptimal for all platforms and ceding a market they are the undisputed owner of. Or maybe the mass of computer users will just accept Windows 8 as the new normal and put up with it no matter how much they hate it. After all, they've been doing that with Office for 20 years.
Most of us drones are issued standard Windows desktops or notebooks. But the story is far different in the VP suites. Many of them have iPads with keyboards. They use them, love them for meetings etc.
This has driven our company to find more and more ways to support them, since when a VP says "Support my device" things often happen.
Eventually this will trickle down to us unwashed masses, and we'll be able to use iOS and Android without having to suffer with Citrix Receiver.
Anectdata is fun...
Oh, sorry, I thought we were just comparing unrelated things to 'prove' Microsoft is in trouble...
This is the definition of "becoming less ubiquitous". It doesn't have to mean they're falling apart and about to be irrelevant, they just have less of a market share than they did
Things to note:
- This could just mean that sales of new Windows computers fell relative to computers with other operating systems, but the sales of Windows computers in absolute numbers still grew.
- This could mean Window users are buying fewer new computers, but Apple users are more prone to upgrade their computers to get the next new shiny model (or upgrade to escape some Rev 1.0 issues that Apple refuses to acknowledge/fix).
So companies are looking at landing Windows 7 in Citrix and VMWare VDI environments. This is scary for Microsoft, as both companies are looking at breaking up the Windows platform into layers, and injecting their own platform tools.
Microsoft needs a landing place for Office that isn't completely controlled by VMWare/Citrix, which is the true cash cow now that the OS is becoming commoditized. So they are finally investing in VDI with Server 2012, and supporting Office via HTTP and alternate platforms.
If you think about 1983 vs. 2013, VDI is the green screen, and tablets are the PCs.
In the past several years, I've come to believe that Office is a much more potent monopoly than Windows itself. Of course, I also think Office is a blight on the software world and the sooner it dies, the better for everyone, but that's another topic.
The fact is, Microsoft can only maintain the status quo (and this has been true for the better part of two decades) by milking their monopoly so it makes great business sense to get Office on as many platforms as possible.
I imagine this wouldn't be happening if Android weren't around, but this move would allow a lot of people to migrate to Linux and remain with Microsoft Office, and I suspect that's exactly what will happen for a lot of folks.
Let's face it. No one wants Windows 8, and a lot of people would choose an alternative but the elephant in the room has always been Office. I'm all for supporting competitors to Office, but they will continue to fight an uphill battle against an entrenched and corrupt foe who does everything in its power to undermine competition, DoJ notwithstanding.
Given that people are not so much abandoning Windows for other choices on the desktop, but many are abandoning the desktop itself - Windows is essentially non-existent in the mobile market and its success in the tablet realm remains to be seen - this is another reason Microsoft should make this move.