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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.'"
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...
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.
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.
I am not aware of the detailed structure of Vista's kernel, but my guess would be it is unlikely to be easily scaled down - it is an OS that requires higher specifications than XP to do mundane tasks like file copying. That doesn't suggest efficiency and portability.
Of course not, that is stupid. But you would still say Linux can run on these devices despite the fact it also has to be recompiled and tweaked etc. I think what they are arguing is that Apple uses the same code base for the iPhone as it does for their desktops. Microsoft however has two completely seperate products for Windows and Windows Mobile which increases the development costs and complexity.
Forget netcraft.
It is official. Gartner now confirms: Windows is collapsing.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community
when Gartner confirmed that Windows is collapsing in complete disarray and
risks becoming a has-been. Coming on the heels of a recent survey which
plainly states that by the end of 2007 only 6.3 percent of the 50,000
enterprise computer users it surveyed were working with Vista.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Windows' future. The
hand writing is on the wall: Windows faces a bleak future. In fact there
won't be any future at all for Windows because Windows is collapsing.
Things are looking very bad for Windows. As many of us are already aware,
Windows continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of
blood.
Fact: Windows is collapsing
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.
Steve has shown in 5 years that Apple can release more interesting stuff than Microsoft. Apple just "does" it, they don't pre-announce years in advance. Steve just shows up on sage with a fully operational Intel Mac running Apple's software Suite (OSX, iLife, etc) on day 1, or with a fully functioning iPhone that happens to have used OSX, on day 1.
Microsoft bellyaches how "hard" software is to make, and constantly delays (and they don't make computers or phones and sell them) Apple makes it look very easy and investors are starting to see Microsoft isn't really that good at their CORE job.
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.
This confusion is very common. There is the core OS and the MacOS X product you can buy in boxes. The core OS does not include Finder or Aqua. Just by getting rid of the superfluous components, Apple was able to shrink OSX to a bare minimum and then, just by selectively compiling the parts that made sense to include in the phone and iPod products, they achieved the desired footprint. It's like compiling a minimal kernel on Linux or BSD - really simple.
There could have been some problems with ARM-incompatible stuff, but those problems did not prevent the product launch.
As for developing, doing it for the iPhone OS is very close to developing for MacOS. Not everything is present, but it is a lot easier than to transition from desktop Windows to Windows CE.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did shrink it even further for smaller devices. The iPhone/iPod Touch have proven it can be done and getting rid of OpenGL ES, CoreAnimation and Cocoa Touch would end up in a very, very small OS.
Yes. Microsoft painted itself into a corner. They will, eventually, figure a way to get out, but I am not sure they will do it in time.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Sure. That's why Microsoft is fighting a class-action suit against customers who disagree withe your assessment.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
No.
Not without using a tool such as vLite to essentially strip Vista down to bare bones. And even then it runs like a dog. 8 year old hardware would be hardware from 2000. We are talking MAYBE a 1Ghz processor, (more likely 800Mgz) and probably either 128 or 256 Mb of RAM. That setup runs XP slowly. Vista, with all the extra overhead the larger kernel is running BARELY FUNCTIONS on a machine such as that.
How do I know? I'VE TRIED IT. Used an old 1Ghz Pentium laptop with 256 MB of RAM, and a vLite'd version of Vista Business with basically NOTHING left in it. Stripped down to basic functionality. It booted, but only JUST. It took no less than 15 minutes to get to the logon screen, and another 5 minutes after that to get to the desktop. Using it was like running an RDP session over a phone line with a large download going at the same time. Slloooooooooooow.
Now, with some extra RAM, that might have been sped up a bit. But in no way would it ever be able to run Vista in a manner that anyone would consider usable. Vista is too big, too bloated, and too damn slow for older hardware. Thankfully, it is on older hardware that Linux really shines. And with fantastic distros like Ubuntu and it's derivatives, there isn't any more reason to fight with Windows if you don't have the cash to upgrade your hardware.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Of course not. Gartner is a think tank for hire, their bread and butter is outlandish predictions. The only news here is that Gartner is predicting bad things for Microsoft. Was Microsoft late on their payments?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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!
The kernel is filled with legacy backward-compatibility stuff from all the way back to Windows 3.1. Some time ago, there was this leaked Windows source code thing going on and someone extracted all the comments and made those available to read. I read through them and saw where there was a LOT of stuff written into the kernel that was there for the purpose of running old code. To me, this is a backwards approach to things... the idea of writing the OS to run applications? The applications should be written for the OS. (I recognize that if Microsoft took this proper approach, they'd risk people not upgrading to their latest OS because of their dependency on older applications that aren't updated, but then that's all part of their broken business model. An OS isn't supposed to be "the thing." It's supposed to be the software that enables access between the hardware and applications that *are* "the thing.")
I'm actually quite pleased to see the reported direction that Windows 7 is taking. As I have stated earlier, I don't plan to run to Windows 7 and leave Linux behind. Linux is home now and I'm comfortable in it. Apple's MacOSX is interesting and I can make good use of it as well, but it's not home either... I have pondered the idea of moving to a Macbook pro or the like but so far it's hard to imagine leaving home where I'm quite comfortable and I'm sure you can identify with the sentiment if you're a Windows user.
But that said, I also recognize that Windows is what's used in business and here at work. Windows is also used by just about everyone on the planet... a planet that, incidentally, is connected by this internet thing which I have to coexist in... this same internet that is over-run with Windows computers that have been compromised and are hosting bot services for people to do all manner of terrible things. If Windows 7 represents the "clean slate" that I hope it does, we might see a serious reduction in the amount of that sort of trouble which will make my life better. What I'm saying is that even non-Windows users will benefit from a new Windows OS on every desktop if only because it may serve to clear away a lot of the crap that is polluting the public internet.
I disapprove of your attempt to disassociate the "bloated GUI" from OS. While it's technically correct, it's practically incorrect. In just the same way that most users think "The Web" is the internet, most people see the GUI as the OS. And since the GUI and the kernel are always together as a virtually inseparable set, they are pretty much one in the same. If you're trying to say that Microsoft could write a new, more simple, GUI for the "Vista kernel" and make it run on lower-end hardware? You're probably right, but not without also modifying the kernel to pull out ALL that backward compatibility stuff. It's really hard to know if they can actually do that or not. Microsoft has testified in court that the GUI, and more specifically, Microsoft Internet Explorer, cannot be removed from the OS because it would break too many things. We know that Microsoft wouldn't lie in court, so it must be true... and so Microsoft would probably also disapprove of your attempt the disassociate the "bloated GUI" from the OS.
Funny, because in 2000 AMD was the first to break the GHz barrier, which prompted the introduction of the Pentium 4 in 2001. I think the P4 2.8GHz was introduced in 2004, but I could be off by a year (in both directions). In 2001 Ati introed the Radeon 9700 and more than a year later the 9800. So, because you are clearly making stuff up, I'll post this reply here to warn others not to believe your doubletrollish post
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
Dear god! If you are going to lie at least make it somewhat within the boundaries of reality. The processor you have in your machine was released by Intel in August 2002, yet you claim to have in a EIGHT YEAR OLD computer. I am sure that Intel would love to find out how you got a machine with a processor from 2 years in to the future. That has to be some amazing feat to reach across the barriers of time to grab yourself a hot new processor. Does Stephen Hawking regularly show up at your house to see what other amazing feats you can accomplish?
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.