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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.'"
Wait, Apple didn't have to customize OS X to run on the iPhone, it was perfect the way it was?
Wait, it's easier for people to develop and distrubte applications for the iPhone, even though the ability isn't avaiable yet?
Are these guys supposed to be taken seriously?
Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista...
You mean the almost-constant nag screens?
or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP...
Making them smarter than the lying marketroids selling it...
to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.
Translation: People are smarter than they think, and an OS that takes twice the hardware to be twice as slow AND even more incompatible with previous software isn't worth my money.
Of course, they still get sales - from the same idiots at my work who want to be upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because it's a bigger number, and then complain that they are confused by Office 2007 and want the tech support guys to "fix" it.
For how many years have slashdot 'experts' been predicting the 'downfall' of windows? For 23 years they have not just controlled, the word is 'dominated' the desktop environment. For the majority of computer users, the words 'Windows' and 'Computer' are borderline synonymous.
And you're proof? Because some users believe that 'Vista sucks' blah blah blah. How many people started ringing the bells for Microsoft after Windows ME? We saw how that worked out...
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.'"
Yeah, that'll last. I'll give it a week before someone finds a manual and migrates their "expertise" to their new operating system.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
until Netcraft "confirms it"[tm].
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I can see this happening rather quickly at home. It hasn't been hard to convince my family members to get away from Windows. While my wife is probably more computer savvy than most, she hasn't had any problems switching from Windows to Linux, and actually likes it more. It's been more difficult for others I've gotten to switch, but in general the result has been positive.
The corporate world is a completely different story, though. Many large, medium, and small companies have committed vast resources to development in .Net. And while a good chunk of that can be run on Mono in a non-Windows environment, it's not entirely the same, and transitioning to something else, from a OS or software perspective, is going to take even more time and money in an economy where money isn't readily available.
Additionally, while you can probably count on your IT staff to have a reasonably easy transition to something other than Windows, your non-tech employee base is almost certainly going to have a great deal of difficulty. Add in the fact that lots of small and mid-size businesses use "friendly" accounting software that runs solely on Windows, and I think Microsoft has a much larger buffer for error than most people think.
Will it happen? God I hope so... but I'm not optimistic it will happen even in the next 5-10 years.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Unfortunately, my meat printer is jammed. I think I should have stuck to flank steak; in retrospect, it appears that hamburger wasn't such a great idea.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Michael Silver, it should be noted, is fairly neutral in his coverage of Microsoft. Here is a link to his past papers:
http://www.gartner.com/Search?op=16&f=2&keywords=&bop=0&op=16&sort=73&archived=0&simple1=0&n=8332&authorId=8332&resultsPerSearch=0&dir=70&sort=73&dir=70
The problem, as I see it, is not Vista itself. Rather, it is the slow but steady migration from PCs being central to computing tasks to reliance on servers for processing power and storage. Although Outlook client may run on your PC, the real work managing your company's mail is handled in the backrooms on server hardware. They aren't running client Windows back there.
So on the front end, as McNealy and Ellison have been saying for a decade, computers require less and less individual computing power, and backend servers need more and more. This is the problem for Windows because the growing requirements of the OS to do all the cool things that users like is outstripping the pace at which the needs of the users are growing. Translation: Vista does too much unnecessary stuff (however cool and flashy it might be.)
Apple does this too, but their hardware requirements are automatically met by virtue of them selling the hardware themselves. Linux, OTOH, is both a low-end client and a high-end server. It fills the roles needed by users without bringing with it a hefty cost per unit.
The upshot is that the PC as a computing platform is ailing. It will always have its place, and it will hang on for quite a while longer. However, the general trend towards less necessary functionality on the client end and more stability and power on the server side means that alternative systems now have a lower hurdle to gain a foothold in the upcoming paradigm shift.
We have already seen a huge shift away from laptops as the mobile computer towards dedicated devices like the Blackberry and smartphone. As we progress, many of the roles that the PC plays now will move closer to the user so that the usage scenario no longer is sitting in front of a glowing monitor but rather sitting back and doing the same job faster and more easily than currently performed. I, for one, welcome our new embedded overlords.
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. To stave this off, either ongoing innovation is required or the illusion of innovation and change is required. Microsoft has done a bit of both with Windows. But it's a thin veneer. As a result, poopulist efforts to 'socialize' this technology into a public utility are surging; hence, Ubuntu et al.
A-Bomb
Windows NT was developed by Dave Cuttler (of DEC VMS team) based on a operating system specification developed by IBM. (It was supposed to be released under the name OS/2 version 3).
Microsoft implemented the Windowing API on top of that operating system.
The fact is that Microsoft has never developed a commercial operating system from scratch!!!
They have only incremented the original Windows NT (a.k.a. OS/2 v3.0) code base, for example by:
- replacing the OS/2 file system delivered in Windows NT with the more modern NTFS
- re-writing the OS/2 deveice driver layer of Windows NT with a new, 32-bit and C-based API [the original NT device driver model was 16-bit and assembler-based]
- moving the implementation of the graphics API into the ring-0 kernel [big mistake!]
- replacing the OS/2 multitaskin DOS compatibility (i.e. the text window of Windows) with a less DOS-compatible one, which was supposed to run on multiple processor architectures.
The effort to create a new operating system core for Vista failed because of lack of in-house knowlege.
The task of writing a new core OS (under the Windows API) seems to be too difficult for a company run by marketing people and lawyers.
If anything, legacy code will be Microsofts downfall (as TFA stated). I saw this happen firsthand for a company I worked for over a decade ago. They had a pretty impressive application and a long list of Fortune 500 corporations as customers. Even IBM (we're talking back before the Windows 3.x days) was basically giving the company a few million dollars a year for the privilege of reselling the software themselves. Well rather than build new versions of the application from the ground up, or even introducing potential incompatibilities between major releases, the powers that be insisted on full backward compatibility.
Over time more competitors showed up in the marketplace, and as the economy shifted IBM stopped tossing money in our laps. Our engineers (of which I was one) spent most of their time trying to figure out how to shoehorn new features and entire new parallel products on top of the existing legacy codebase. The inevitable result was that we struggled while our competitors came out with newer, more modern & more powerful software. I eventually left that company to go to a startup where 7 others from this company had already gone to. That company was acquired a couple years later, and the application pretty much no longer exists.
If the engineers, who had requested the ability to create a new product from the ground up, had been listened to, then perhaps that company would still be around and competitive. It was mainly because of the business decisions to retain backward compatibility, like MS has done with Windows, that they eventually disappeared. As long as MS maintains their own demand for backward compatibility they'll be waging a slow & prolonged war that they have no chance of winning.
They'd be able to install software with apt or Synaptic if they had the root account's password, were in the sudoers file, or found a privilege escalation exploit.
Presumably the first two options are disallowed by policy and machine setup. The latter is a hazard of running computers. That's not security through obscurity, that's security through proper setup and patching the OS to make sure exploits are eliminated as they're discovered.
...do we really need Gartner to tell us that Vista is crap - one year and 3+ months after it was release?
Statements like "Users want a smaller Windows that can run on low-priced -- and low-powered -- hardware..." make me wonder if these guys graduated at the top of their class at Captain Obvious University.
Additionally they state "...increasingly, users work with "OS-agnostic applications..." - is there a reason for them to not just say "web apps"? And how about the fact that most large organizations have so much legacy code that even if Windows development stopped entirely today, you wouldn't get rid of all of that desktop apps for many, many, many years.
""Apple introduced its iPhone running OS X," no, it's a variant, which is a code-word for sub-set.
Of course Windows is going to decline.
The International Monetary Fund just announced that the sub-prime crisis has tipped the USA into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. During recessions, the first thing to get cut back on is unnecessary infrastructure replacement -- and PCs have been marketed on the basis of planned obsolescence for around a decade now. So the PC replacement cycle will be hit, hard.
Vista is a resource hog, Ubuntu is just about coming up to mass market usability, and a lot of places are going to stop replacing their PCs annually or bi-annually in the next couple of years. Unless Windows 7 is as comparatively lightweight as XP, it's going to crash in the "upgrade your OS" market -- only new PCs will ship with it. So Microsoft will have two poor sellers in a row -- which is enough, in the mind of the fickle public, to establish a trend, and with Apple chowing down on 25% of the high-end laptop market already, they're in danger of being squeezed between a high-end competitor and a low-end one.
But.
Windows is so big, with such a huge established base, that its decline will resemble that of the old IBM mainframe environment -- which is still doing fine, decades after the death of the mainframe was predicted. This ain't going to happen overnight.
Because Apple is even more expensive and just as proprietary as Windows, won't let me build my own system, and is poorly supported by software developers. If Apple dominated the market, there is every reason to believe they would be just as heavy-handed as MS, if not much worse.
Because doing anything in Linux ends up with me banging my head against my computer screen. Even Ubuntu, the most user-friendly distro so far, is an endless series of frustrations. "Why can't I just download a piece of software and double-click on it to install?!?!" "What is the difference between KDE and Gnome and why should it matter?!?!" "Why do I have to go to the command line interface to do even basic stuff?" Hell, until the latest release, Ubuntu wouldn't even let me attach a projector without a complicated edit to the Xorg config file. ARGHHHHH!!!
Windows may die one day, but it's going to take a *lot* more work before anyone else is going to slay that dragon.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Balmer is a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur of the past. He's still playing an aggressive dominance card of leadership, but his ship has started sinking very slowly a long time ago. His style of management is imperious and ignorant. This used to be the way to go, when Microsoft was a aggressive and flexible shop going for world domination - not by being better, but being faster, and by _setting_ standards instead of waiting for them to evolve. Those times are long gone. Microsoft is a moloch. Vista didn't set any standard for anything. Apple did on the desktop and Google and others did in the web. And still there we have yelling Balmer as commander in chief shouting at those who could know better instead of listening and comprehending what is really going on.
Microsoft got all corporate and forgot their customer were the *end users*.
They seemed to get it in their head their customers were the people asking for DRM throughout the OS.
They seemed to believe the end users (the ones who have to pay for, and use their product) don't matter. They thought people just wanted some fancy need interface tweaks, and they'll accept whatever is forced on them.
It turned out they were wrong.
Microsoft need to strip it down, make the next version wicked fast, make it open to people who want to use their platform and media the way they want, and encourage developers. Backward compatibility? Only to the extent of running the top 500 well-behaved applications.
Give the next version away. Use the slogan "We're showing Windows the door".
There are folks that take the word of Gartner like it is manna from heaven and it continues to amaze me. They've managed to position themselves a trusted source by putting products in a 2x2 square after they interview people using the software despite the fact that most of the time they end up being wrong. Like any good psychic, they only refer to their successes at predicting the future and hope people will forget when they missed the mark.
STFU & GBTW
The point is they can't trash Linux since they only have write access to /home/user. Neither can they install games except to /home/user. It's trivial to simply reset /home/user to a default state with every login. Like most changes on Linux, this does not require a reboot.
Rights are properly configured on Linux by default. Your hypothetical kids in the library won't be able to touch anything system related, or anything not owned by the user. There is no configuration required to enforce this.
That is not how it works in Windows. Yes, you can enforce user levels in XP but some apps will not work, and it is pretty easy to bypass anyway. Maybe Vista is better, but I certainly don't expect to see Vista on a public terminal anytime soon.
1) Is solved by disabling anything except the C drive as a boot device and setting a BIOS and a grub password. The case may need to be physically secured as well depending on how enthusiastic the students are at wanting to subvert the security.
2) Many apps don't run well or at all on a properly secured Windows. Ubuntu's Unix like base means apps are designed to expect a rights restricted environment so it's much less painful.
#2 Is actually Vista's largest problem. Vista is trying to force good application software design that runs against years of experience in the Windows world and it's going to take a long time for app makers to adjust to the new reality.
ERROR: No mod points in account. Abort, Rety, Fail? _
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Have you ever tried to secure a Windows terminal? It's a nightmare - even if you set up a locked down account, there's a good chance that a necessary app will need an account with Administrator privileges. Yes, you can argue that those apps aren't Microsoft's fault; that kind of design, however, had been the standard for quite a while for Windows application development.
I've never seen a well-run Windows lab that didn't have Norton Ghost (or equivalent) installed to re-image the machines on a regular basis. While the newer versions of Windows are much better than the previous ones in this regard, it's much easier to secure a system that was designed from the ground-up for multi-user functionality. The NT code-base was designed that way, but a lot of bad habits migrated over from the DOS-based Windows's.
I prefer to have a platform with less features but a stable design at its base (*nix) than a platform with lots of features but an unstable and unsecure foundation (Win32).
To use a real-world analogy (I've been involved in a lot of construction stuff recently): adding new trim, or even remodeling a room, is much easier than replacing the foundation.
All of you open source developers hoping for the day that Linux/BSD/etc is taken seriously as a consumer platform (similar to what Windows and the Mac OS have enjoyed for over a decade) need to start banding together now to discuss how to make something as complicated as Linux truly accessible to any user without sacrificing the benefits Linux offers. Until commercial entities like Adobe see that there is a viable audience to market their products to in Linux/BSD/etc, these OSes are going to live out most of their lives as little more than behind-the-scenes grunt-work software or as a niche item on a hobbyist's / enthusiast's computer in some basement.
Somehow, there needs to be some form of interface consistency across the board that is logical, useful and attractive to even the least intelligent of users.
Take the 3D application "Blender" for example. Most of us know that Blender itself is fairly powerful when used correctly by the right person. Yet despite the fact that Blender is both power and free, your typical consumer level user is far more likely to gravitate toward products like Carrara Studio, based almost entirely on it's presentation and interface design. People don't like it when their software intimidates them and they are more than willing to pay good money to avoid it whenever possible.
You also have to consider that time is a major factor as well. While anyone could "learn" to use Blender effectively and efficiently, the time invested in overcoming the learning curve is too much for many of us. If you were to compare Blender's interface directly against Carrara Studio's interface. Most users would again gravitate toward Carrara since they perceive a much lower investment of time involved in trying to "get it". The reality though, is that the core learning curve on either of these apps for most functions is probably identical.
Overall though, it's likely going to be a lot more difficult than it sounds to put a new face on Linux to make it pretty, useful and non-threatening to the average user. Hell, Apple's been trying for nearly 10 years with Mac OS X, and they've only just barely got it right. (Despite the numerous flaws...) It can be done, but it'll take a lot of effort to really pull it off.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I guess this post must be a figment of my imagination, then, since there's no way I could possibly be writing from a laptop that's been happily running Ubuntu with Intel wireless since 6.06. ...Seriously, can we please stop spreading this "Linux systems can't use 802.11x" FUD? It stopped being true for the vast majority of users several major distributions ago.
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
As a Linux user I have the opposite frustrations when I come to use Windows. "Why do I have to search the web to find a piece of software to download? Why can't I just go to 'Add/Remove Programs', type in the name (or a keyword) and click install?", "Why can't I chose a different desktop environment when I log in?", "Why can't I use the command line to do even basic stuff?"
Different strokes for different folks.
Stupid flounders!
We have kiosks at our university to check your class schedule, register your account and general account changes. Pretty much everything else is locked down when you are logged in as "guest". EXCEPT, you simply open windows media player, then open explorer.exe from inside media player, and you now have access to all the programs installed without you being authenticated to use them. I know this may be "easy" to lock down, but the fact remains, it really darn near impossible to block all the holes in Windows kiosks. If it's not in the Start Menu, and Run has been disabled, doesn't mean people cannot get to it.
And really, there are a lot of people who don't have a clue, who need "analysts" to help them form opinions: they're called "customers" or in some circles "clients".
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
There's no real class system here. The comments about low UIDs are a JOKE, okay? It's really more of a meritocracy. If you are tactful, humble, erudite, and most of all, well informed on the subject you are posting about, you will be respected and modded up, even if the view is unpopular and you have a seven digit UID. If you are an asshole or an idiot, you will be modded down. As a general rule. There are exceptions.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
From TFA Summary: "must make radical changes to the operating system"
Any software developer knows that 'radical changes' to working (however imperfectly) code is a bad idea. The only thing really wrong with Vista (other than the necessity of all those graphics in the first place, which boils down to a matter of opinion) is the video drivers, which can be blamed on Nvidia and ATI, not Microsoft. I get similar problems using the proprietary binary drivers on Linux from time to time as well though. It usually only crashes Xwindows rather than requiring a reboot, but you probably shouldn't be running a 3d graphics on a machine with uptime requirements in the first place.
Mr. Silver and Mr. MacDonald are either:
a) Complete morons
b) Covert Linux enthusiasts frustrated by Linux's slow advances in the desktop space
c) Very knowledgeable about the direct relationship between sensationalism and ratings and lack thereof between intelligent analysis and ratings
I went and installed Windowblinds and a Vista skin on our XP machines. Now users think we have Vista for all intents and purposes, and I get to support XP. It's win-win!