Gartner Analysts Warn That Windows Is Collapsing

spacefiddle writes "Computerworld has an article about a presentation from Gartner analysts in Las Vegas claiming that Windows is 'collapsing', and that Microsoft 'must make radical changes to the operating system or risk becoming a has-been.' Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald provided an analysis of what went wrong with Vista, and what they feel Microsoft can and must do to correct its problems. Larry Dignan of ZDNet has his own take, and while he agrees, he suggests that the downfall of Windows will be slow and drawn-out. As an interesting tangent to this, there's also a story from a few days prior about Ubuntu replacing Windows for a school's library kiosks, getting good performance out of older hardware. '[Network administrator Daniel] Stefyn said he was "pleasantly surprised" to discover that the Kubuntu desktops ran some applications faster with Linux than when they ran on Windows. An additional benefit of Windows' departure from student library terminals saw the students cease 'hacking the setup to install and play games or trash the operating system.'"

Comments

Re:Windows vs Ubuntu

[DaveV1.0]

Hope she doesn't want to use the wireless card.

Re:Really?

[Idiomatick]

Oh my bad, I was leaning against the reality distortion field switch, man it could have gotten bad if it made it to the 'ludicrous' setting. At that point people simply start shedding money whenever they see a guy in a black shirt.

Re:Important lines from TFA

[nicklott]

Pointing out my obvious grammatical errors doesn't make you a big man. Nor does it invalidate my point.

PS Have you ever noticed how close E is to W on the keyboard?

Re:Part of technology life cycle

[debrain]

When a technology service becomes ubiquitous and homogenous and - importantly - ceases being innovative, it runs the risk of becoming a candidate for conversion into a public utility. Or, alternatively, a commodity. Accord, from Commodification,

While in economic terms, commodification is closely related to and often follows from the stage when a market changes from one of monopolistic competition to one of perfect competition, a product essentially becomes a commodity when the repeated changes- because of competition-outplay themselves. It is essentially called a performance oversupply- which means that the market is performance saturated and any differentiation, even when being offered, is more than what the market demands. Commodification can be the desired outcome of an entity in the market, or it can be an unintentional outcome that no party actively sought to achieve.

I personally believe a commodification of operating systems is what we will see happen, eventually. With any luck, those operating systems will be 'Debian free'.