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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Has OP ever been in one of the 6 million businesses is the U.S. lately? If he had he probably would have noticed that over 90% of the desktops running Windows. Many of them with ie locked down. With the server rooms full of Microsoft products. And those responsible for procurement unaware of much else.

Microsoft may be in a long, slow decline in the consumer marketplace, but you'd never know from those 100 million desktops.

Do you think that maybe Microsoft was smart enough to foresee this so that's why they're so locked in in the enterprise?

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I also see a lot of office furniture when I look inside a business. But nobody cares much about office furniture. For most of the market, it's a boring commodity that is bought by professional office managers who care a lot about the price. It lasts a relatively long time and doesn't change very often.

It's also an intensely cyclical business, which is no doubt a big reason why Microsoft's financials are so screwed.

The moral of this story is that the notion of Apple vs Microsoft is more stale than it has ever been. They aren't even in the same industry anymore. You could imagine investing in both of them at once and calling it diversification.

Apple has turned computer sales into a question of quality, much like the Japanese manufacturers gained control of the domestic car market by making it a question of quality.

Meanwhile, there are businesses that still want to run full screen 16-bit DOS programs in emulated Windows XP on 64-bit Windows 7. Windows has become a metaphor of the Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls.

Actually, Japanese car companies gained control of the US market because they offered affordable cars that were more efficient. Once consumers saw that they were getting equal or better quality for less money, they switched.

That’s the US market, but the parent wrote “domestic” which, as far as I understand it, means internal, non-exported, in this case the Japanese market.

Completely true about apple vs msft.

I'm not sure I agree about the furniture implication. Maybe practically nobody cares about furniture, but the suppliers do. If they sell 90% of all office furniture at a great margin, they are a successful company. Commodity implies close to perfect competitive markets. That is not the case here.

Anyway people buying servers care. They may not be cutting edge, but they care what they use.

I'm not sure I agree about the furniture implication.

Frankly, I'm not sure I agree either. But I decided to write it down anyway and see how it looked on the screen.

Going back to the original article, though, the point was that industries have "thought leader" consumer groups. I would never in my wildest dreams consider calling any IT department I've worked with a "thought leader". The "thought leader" groups for PC purchases appear to be leaning heavily towards Apple.

Also, while most offices are wall-to-wall PCs, I know that new PCs at our office are budgeted in the $700-800 range for mid-range officefolk (a little but not much more for developers, a little less for simple clerical users). All such purchases this year fall well below the $1000 price point.

FWIW, our developers do tend to buy Macs, and we also tend to get a Windows license for those machines. The Macs obviously cost more than $1000 per box, even with the minor discount we get from Apple.

True. I'm not interested in the furniture that is hardware either. I'm interested in computing, not in computers.

Tell that to Herman Miller.

"It lasts a relatively long time and doesn't change very often."

"It's also an intensely cyclical business, which is no doubt a big reason why Microsoft's financials are so screwed."

This is exactly why people staying on XP is such a huge problem for them. If people only "upgrade" when a computer breaks or buy another license when they get a new employee, then the the office furniture business fits Microsoft pretty well.

I think you bring up a very interesting point. Microsoft is indeed tightly embedded in the enterprise. If they ceded the home PC market to focus on the enterprise, I suspect they would see much better revenue growth. Enterprise needs often emphasize things that are not really high on home users' lists: remote installation & configuration, customizable user security policies, integrated calendaring and email, etc...

To be sure, MS is certainly doing a lot in the enterprise space: SQL Server, Sharepoint, Outlook, and IIS just to name a few. But little (if any) of that stuff translates especially well to average consumers who have no need for such products. In spite of that, MS persists in having all these consumer distractions that are money losers and sap time and resources to support and promote (see: Zune, Xbox). But frankly, that's not really what they're good at as a company. I mean that as no disrespect to the people on those teams, but the company itself is just not consumer oriented. The consumer side of MS products always feels "bolted on". It's just not part of the culture. They just need to start being OK with that.

If MS could realize that they don't need to dominate every corner of the computing world in order to be a competitive company, it would be a huge start to getting them back on the right path. Remember when they wanted to buy Intuit, and then came out with MS Money to compete against Quicken when that fell through? That sort of thing makes little sense, and collectively those small things distract a company from its mission (to be fair, they recently killed MS Money, so there is hope).

Here's hoping they turn it around. The marketplace needs competition, and a toothless Microsoft wearing a "kick me" sign is not helpful for the industry as a whole.

Totally agree - the lack of focus is what I think is killing them. It's like a giant insecurity complex that they have to be in every damn market. Taking a page from Apple in the days where Steve would draw a quadrant in his presentations and just say, here are the 4 things we do. Period. MS should do the same, make those things world class, THEN start to diversify again where it makes sense.

MS deal with Intuit did not "fall through" they tricked intuit into thinking there was a deal, got their internal lines of code then booted them out the door like a 2 dollar hooker, and wrote MS Money with the code. This was standard operating procedure for MS well over a decade past when it began and the list of victims is long.

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

There are only 6 million businesses in the US?

I thought that the "over 90% of the desktops running Windows" is an old figure from the (Microsoft backed) Gartner Group. The large firm I used to work for was partially bought out by Microsoft, and so we used Microsoft. How about a more realistic (and up to date) figure of how many Windows machines vs Linux/phones/game-consoles/Google/Apple/etc machines?

As for "The Enterprise", beam me up because the majority of servers are Linux.

The likelihood of the average business to adopt Non-Windows Computers seems extremely small.

The only reason to buy Apple would be to woe the employees, at a significant cost. Linux would probably not make many employees happy, and would not save that much money either. So which companies would make the switch? Except for designer shops, of course.

"If he had he probably would have noticed that over 90% of the desktops running Windows. Many of them with ie locked down."

But think about how astounding that figure is. 10% of systems in a company being something else in an environment utterly hostile to non-Windows systems. That would have been 99% just five years ago...

Looking at Snow Leopard features, it's finally a desktop that I would prefer to use over Windows in a corporate environment just because of better exchange integration alone. Apple is doing things that enable that percentage to grow significantly, and that is aided by a push from within by many people that have started to use macs at home and now would rather they use them at work as well.

And that's where the metric of "people that love computers" comes to be of such importance, because those are the people that make macs work at work, then the casual users can and will follow.

Frankly I think the healthiest situation would be a good mix of a variety of desktops in the enterprise, the Windows monoculture is a dangerous thing and lets internal apps really get mired in overly targeted technologies that don't allow use from other platforms - which eventually leads to issues in upgrading the platform you do have down the road.

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