ZDNet Proclaims "Windows: It's Over"

plastick writes "You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end. ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains: 'The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved.'"

Comments

Whats the alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are people going to switch to Mac OS? Linux? Or stay on Windows 7 until a "spiritual successor" to Windows comes?

The article largely hinges on "Windows 8 comes out != PC hardware sales drop". Its just trolling for readers.

Re:Whats the alternative?

[mwvdlee]

To me, the question is what Microsoft will do with Win 9 (or whatever it will be called).
If they'll fix the user interface, I'll probably skip 8 and upgrade to 9 at some point.
If they won't, then Windows is a dead-end for professional users and I'll upgrade to Linux.
Currently I'm assuming the latter. I'm stuck on Win 7 for atleast one more year (due to external forces), but after that I'm planning to install Mint unless Microsoft surprises me by creating a worthy successor.

Re:Whats the alternative?

[RabidReindeer]

Oh, they realize that alright. But the thing is, Microsoft has never been about finding the technically best solution. They are trying to find the best "business" solution.

And that's what's killing them. Every businessman's nightmare is that his (her) product becomes a commodity. No longer a one-of-a-kind product that can be priced arbitrarily, but one that has to compete against an open market, where the lowest price is often the determining factor.

OS's have been trending towards commodification for years. With each release of each OS, the reasons for upgrading have become less and less compelling as the core featureset has become more and more complete. This is why "killer apps" are so important to OS's. Because the OS dream app is one that requires features unavailable except by upgrading the OS. Here, too, there are problems, since fewer and fewer killer apps make demands that the present-day OS's cannot fulfill. In fact, with the webification of apps, they're actually pretty much required to be that way. The days when a webapp could demand ActiveX controls and IE6 are fading into history.

So Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, unless they can come up with some startling new "must-have" ability to re-prime the pump, people are going to be resistant to paying for upgrades. On the other, their latest attempt to "must-have" is something that almost nobody thinks that they "must have". Quite the contrary. And, in fact, they've further damaged themselves in that for the first time ever, it's less traumatic for users to move to a competing OS than it is to stay comfortingly locked in to the MS Way.

Re:Whats the alternative? (none for business)

[__aaltlg1547]

Windows may be dead or dying for a HOME operating system. For business, it will keep on going.

Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it. Such businesses, which comprise a HUGE market, are not going to switch from Windows to MacOS or anything else in the foreseeable future. To do so, they would require a full-on replacement for Windows that includes a full Windows API so every program can run just like it does on Windows, with the same access to hardware, system resources and other programs. And they are not going to go there without a GUARANTEE that whatever proposed replacement will run every program with no trouble.

Never mind that Microsoft never gave them perfect forward migration or any guarantee of it. But they were Microsoft, the same company, so there was some degree of trust that they were going to make the new system reasonably compatible with the old API and they did ever since Windows NT. Conservative companies even so waited at least a year after release before they started phasing in new systems. Sometimes well over two years.

And they're not going to go for a small company's product or a free (e.g. Linux) replacement for Windows because there's nobody to sue if they fuck up your systems and stop critical business processes.

Maybe in a decade, Microsoft will be mostly gone from the business world. Probably not.

Re:Whats the alternative? (none for business)

[endus]

Absolutely right.

Windows also incorporates centralized management features that either don't exist or are not as easy to use in other operating systems. It's all standardized, easy to implement, and relatively seamless. These traits allow relatively low-skilled people to support Windows.

I was having some authentication issues and didn't have the permissions to remove and readd my computer to the domain (pretty sure the machine password was out of sync). The tech that came to my computer didn't know how to run a command in DOS, but she did know how to remove my computer from the domain, rename it, and re-add it. Is this a good thing for the computing environment? Definitely not. But it's definitely good for companies' bottom line because they don't have to pay people who really know what they're doing and are highly educated.

Unfortunately the ability for low-skilled people to keep the lights on extends to servers too. No doubt Windows can develop some REALLY complex problems, but by and large getting services up and running isn't that big of a deal.

Software support is definitely critical too. Legacy applications are the bane of my security-focused existence. They cause all sorts of problems, but they keep the work going.

There are just no realistic alternatives at this point. You can point to one OS or another as having some of the desirable traits needed in an enterprise OS, but the point is that none of them have ALL of those desirable traits. Application support goes way way beyond a word processor, spreadsheet, and power point...there are thousands of specialized applications that are critical for businesses to run. Companies like hospitals have made HUGE investments in software to manage EMRs and issues with the user interface of one version of windows are not going to cause them to abandon that investment overnight.