Microsoft, capitulation and the end of Windows Everywhere
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
> PCs aren't going away any time soon, any more than faxes or mainframes did, but they are the past, not the future
Faxes and mainframes faded into corners of businesses, and this is never going to happen with PCs. Sure, maybe desktops, but everybody I know has a laptop and uses them a lot for certain tasks (some of which have been superceded by their mobile, addmittedly). There are just some things you can't do on a mobile - plug a HDMI cable into it, play half decent games, torrent, write your disseration. PC's will evolve but saying they will fade away like faxes is a bit silly IMO. Phones are also newer, change faster and are replaced a lot (once a year/2 years) whereas a laptop lasts a lot longer and people are more resistant to upgrading (if it ain't broke don't fix it, which is something that doesn't seem to apply to buying new mobiles. Perhaps it's because moving PC's is a pain if you're not technical).
> Windows had actually ceased to be the dominant development platform in the late 1990s with the rise of the web
You should tell that to the endless numbers of of .NET developers (who didn't exist in the 1990's) and enterprises that run on Windows. Having apps run in your browser is cool, but a quick glance at my start menu shows a lot of non-web software, all developed for (and on) Windows.
Sure. But I disagree strongly that it is a significantly declining one.
Desktops no doubt are disappearing quickly in favour of laptops. But I fail to see how PC computing is going anywhere. Businesses still have 99% of their employees at a desk. People may not be writing Word documents as much anymore but they are interacting with complex web apps which are ill suited to phones/tablets.
IMHO we are moving to a mobile world. Not a purely phone/tablet world.
I'm actually really surprised Apple hasn't gone down this road as it would be a really easy way to increase OS X market share if every iPhone suddenly became a Mac when plugged into a dock.
We don't have a well-polished OS that can seamlessly transition from a single-app-at-a-time smartphone UI to a simultaneous multi-app desktop UI depending on the size of the screens attached. Windows 10 comes close in terms of the transitions and polish, but only scales down to a tablet interface, rather than smartphone. The Ubuntu attempts at this just severely lack polish when trying to use it as a phone.
On the hardware side, ARM is too limiting in terms of software availability, and x86 just doesn't have anything that fits in a smartphone power envelop and can also handle a much heavier workload when used as a typical workstation.
We're seeing some rapid progress on both fronts though, so I'm hopeful it won't be too long before someone finds the right formula.
...but it is declining. Thats what all the data and consumer reports show. Seasonally adjusted, taking windows 10 into account. The industry is slowing down.
Obviously we're not going to go 'mobile only' overnight, but here are the brutal facts:
- You make more money when you have a greater potential audience of buyers.
- Investors are not stupid. Investment capital will go where the users are going.
For developers and certain technical jobs some kind of desktop machine will probably always be a thing, but there are a lot of people out there finding they dont need a laptop. Even in business.
Windows is no longer 'the' platform.
Wanting something to be true doesnt make it true.
People would often mis-understand post PC to mean "death of the PC" but really, it just meant "death of the interesting PC market where new money could be made."
Yet. People said the same thing about PCs, and then about laptops.
Due to the mobile form factor there are certain use cases that it simply can not fit while still being a "phone". This is not because the phone will lack processing power, it's literally because the form factor just can't have enough input & output options. Barring major battery upgrades, it also literally lacks the power to solve all problems. The extra hardware will also have laptop- or desktop-class heat dissipation capabilities, which a smart phone simply can not solve without, again, being something other than a phone when it's being a phone.
That is all to say, there are real and specific reasons that phones can't eat all the use cases the way minicomputers ate mainframes and desktops ate minicomputers. The only way for phones to eat all the use cases is to hybridize "back" a step and also become the things it is replacing again.
We've seen some abortive attempts at this. I find myself wondering if the fundamentally closed nature of the major phone operating systems is inhibiting the creation of this stuff, because the requisite OS changes to make this work are too hard. While I don't own one I still find myself rooting for the Firefox phone or the Ubuntu phone... they've still got a chance to beat the other guys to this market. And I for one would hate to sacrifice the openness of my entire computing stack because "the phone", which at this point will be little more than "one particular app", is closed. That's an awful lot to sacrifice to an increasingly minor use case.
And, funnily enough, Windows tablets can do that today, and the phones get it with Windows 10.
(It's hard to read the market's mind. But every once in a while, you can guess where it's going to go in advance... and get yourself brutally murdered in your financials when you show up to the party years before the money shows up.)
Back on the topic of the original article, it's possible this is Microsoft's core strategic play... if they agree with me that this is inevitable, they've still got the income and the OS resources to stick out the market's slowness, and build an incredible offering on this front out with all their resources. It's at least possible that they could indeed unseat an incumbent Android/Apple duopoly if they can be that much better than the competition once this use case becomes big... and it's not hard to imagine it going down that way. They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.
Supporting older hardware, too. The fact every Windows 8 Nokia is getting a Win 8 upgrade contrasts pretty well with the way my Android 5 device won't be getting a patch for a critical security vulnerability.
Rob Landley once keenly noted the signature event that must occur for one computer generation to usurp another. It must become self-hosting, i.e. it must be able to compile itself. I cannot currently compile Android on Android or iOS on iOS.
You actually could, hypothetically, compile Android on Android, in a sense, by chrooting into a Debian environment and compiling from there. I've done at least the chroot part (I had a Debian chroot environment with Xfce installed on my Galaxy Tab 2 for quite a while, though it was really slow and limited by the tablet's measly RAM).
The idea of running a GNU/Linux-like system on Android (reusing the device's kernel in a chroot or a similar setup) is basically the idea behind the Ubuntu for Android concept that fizzled away as Ubuntu's mobile version started to be developed: plug your phone into a dock, and the Ubuntu chroot takes over the peripheral devices and presents a desktop.
The reality is that it's running on the Android device itself, using the device's own kernel. I personally think that qualifies in a technical sense.
This is for completely superseding the previous generation. When the level of functionality of the new platform surpasses the needs of a all pure consumers, a general purpose computer will become a niche item, much like a Sony or Nintendo development system.
Exactly. Some few tasks have migrated to mobile, and more will follow. But not all, and probably not even most.
Also, the "desktop" I'm typing this on is a laptop plugged into an external monitor and keyboard. Most times it might as well be a desktop machine. A smaller screen and keyboard will never be as good as full sized ones.
There will be evolution of platforms, and migration of tasks to platforms that fit the task better. But I'm afraid that sitting at a desk and wanting full-sized, dedicated screens, keyboards and mice is going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Not because mobile isn't powerful enough or because the UI hasn't yet matured, but because sitting at a desk is a better fit for some tasks.
And that's the difference between "dominant" and "growing".
Windows desktop development might have been still growing at the time but web was growing much faster and fairly quickly became dominant.
And smartphones are better than PC in all sorts of ways. They can always be with you, they can function as a camera and video recorder directly, they aren't a box into which you need to figure out how to get your content into. They take up less space, and can easily be customized with cases for style and self expression.
Home computers started as a niche interest, and they'll return to that.
Simple ergonomics. Forget dissertations, I get annoyed writing Hacker News comments on my phone. Technology may change, but human physiology doesn't, and until we get telepathic interfaces, a "human sized" interface is going to be most comfortable for any task that takes longer than a few minutes.
Maybe the pc or laptop form factor will morph into a docking station for mobile device.
PC laptops are so damn cheap that cost isn't an issue for all but the poorest. Who already do use mobile only.
I wrote the majority of my dissertation using Google Docs ... but switched to Word when I had to try and figure out the byzantine formatting required by my department.
As a non-smartphone using Linux user, I'm just a spectator in all this.
Edit: Just noticed: The first graph also compares unit numbers instead of how many dollars changed hands, making it even more silly.
So who really cares if kids need a new shiny phone every christmas to be hip? It's just a "gadget" for now.
Nowadays smart phones are getting LOTS of sales because the technology is evolving a lot and humanity as a whole is still "on-boarding". There's actually a reason to buy new ones every year as the new models are significantly different.
Are there much more cars than trucks? Certainly yes. Are the cars making the trucks completely not needed? Certainly no.
The phone is now a primary photo editor for the majority of users. It's where I'm authoring this comment right now.
As for photography, messaging, and gps. Well, of course. Those are a natural use for that form factor. I'm not going to take my laptop out to take a picture... (I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention that the phone is better for making phone calls too).
Maybe it's a quirk of history that modern phones are named after the telephone; most phone usage involves reading text, not speaking or listening.
For some content creation, there's nothing that can replace a real keyboard and a real (large) screen.
The platform game is not short term. And I would be turning my attention to Google who look in far worse shape long term. They are still very much an advertising company dependent on search revenues. And they haven't demonstrated much ability to expand into other markets.
> One Windows app, deployed everywhere with a focus on productivity and smart services. In no way has there been any capitulation. In fact Microsoft leads the space. Does Apple have universal apps ?
The value of universal apps are debatable, but let's say Microsoft does rule that space. When $some_crazy_high_percentage of delivered phones are android and iOS, the market has spoken - people dont' care about running the same app on their phone and their desktop. Even if Microsoft successfully makes a shift to offering their app development platform on iOS and Android, they're now doing that from a position of weakness. There's certainly money to be made there, but its the difference between a serf and a lord. Microsoft is the lord of its own domain when they control the phone platform, and is a serf in Apple's.
But then you switch to something else:
> And does Apple or Google have an equivalent to Azure's strategic analytics plays ? No.
But that's an entirely different rodeo than the whole thrust of the article, which is the declining dominance of the PC and Microsoft's lack of success in the mobile space. Apple doesn't even care about the enterprise computing space from that perspective, and Amazon absolutely does want to offer those analytics - it's an entirely different set of competitors.
So, sure, yes, Microsoft is doing cool stuff with Azure, which is great, maybe that's the future of the business. But that's a very different business than owning 90-something percent of the software powering every personal computing device in the world.
Is it? Phones and cloud services aren't in competition, they're complimentary services -- phones create demand for cloud services.
Sure, from the standpoint that devices create demand for computing services, which these days are delivered via the cloud. But there's a lot less of an inherent advantage that Microsoft has in that environment.
On top of that, the money to be made is a lot lower. Let's throw out a scenario here - Microsoft trades its OS dominance for a dominance in cloud computing. They lose all of their OS revenue (unlikely to happen) in exchange for having a huge chunk of the cloud computing market (also unlikely to happen).
If we model this out - Amazon AWS in 2015 will make roughly $6b in revenue, which is about 10% of the total public cloud market in 2015 according to IDC In 2018, this market is supposed to be 128b. Let's say that Microsoft in 2018 has 2x Amazon's current market share, which would be a huge success by any measure, that gives them ~$24b in revenue.
Which is half of what they made in business software licensing in 2014. Half. They made 40 billion just on the business licensing end of their traditional software business.
I fully believe Microsoft will continue to live and innovate and potentially succeed in this brave new world, but it will do so at a huge long-term impact to its revenue and size.
> I love how conservative and backwards-looking Hacker News can be. PCs rule! Phones are toys!
Source: https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/626173995566497792
No, they use apps
There's no doubt that Microsoft has lost the mobile platform and the value of Windows has declined. But still, I'm much more optimistic than Evans about the future value of Office - it's quite possible that in 30 years most enterprise businesses will still buy an Office subscription as standard. Just as Apple creams almost all smartphone profits despite a 15% market share, so Microsoft can get outsize profit for productivity apps by concentrating on enterprise businesses.
This is why Devices vs PC Market share is very relevant for gauging Company trajectories, the gateway to consumers is moving "Post-PC" to Internet Devices where those with business models that benefit from a strong mobile presence are set to prosper in future.
With Microsoft's flailing Windows Phone and Surface their grip on consumer mind-share is steadily declining, they've still got Office to target end-users but even this is focused on Business users whilst Xbox and Minecraft targets gamers. Skype's a popular App that they may be able to do something with, but ultimately it's just an App on a much larger Mobile ecosystem.
Their Azure cloud platform does benefit from Companies hosting their Mobile Web Service on Azure and Windows/SQL Server Licenses so they'll have a healthy income for many years to come, but unless they have a prosperous mobile strategy they're going to miss the next lucrative computing platform which will affect their mindshare with Consumers and overall growth vs the Big 4.
Smartphone makers have little to no incentive to change this.