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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.'"
I haven't counted Usenet posts lately, so can anyone check with Netcraft?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
As a Microsoft partner and management consultant I don't understand:
Realistically Microsoft only has one chance at long term success, and that includes firing Ballmer, restaffing the board, and radically changing its staff evaluation processes away from Darwinian struggle to "what's best for Microsoft as a whole".
What I expect it will do instead is gradually fade into irrelevance:
So Microsoft's predicament is worse than a single product failure - at a CEO level Microsoft is simply not doing enough to change.
I'm not a windows guy. My laptop is a macbook pro and my day to day workstation is debian. However, I recently built a windows gaming computer and I like windows 8. Is it different? Yes. Does it have a learning curve? Yes. In the end it's stable, solid, easy to use, and looks nice.
The reason PC sales are down is because computing power has reached a point where we don't need a new computer every 2-3 years. My mac mini is 6 years old. I only need to replace it because apple won't support it any longer. Otherwise it's speed and power is fine. I expect my new desktop windows 8 PC will last me at least 6 or 7 years.
Gone is the day of the power computer. Desktop computing has reached the point where there is no leap in upgrading. It's incremental, people only do incremental upgrades when their old equipment dies.
While I agree with you here, you probably have overlooked the good ol' Microsoft arrogance. When MS have failed they it has been because of their own arrogance. While Windows 95 was mostly a win, people tend to forget that part of it was a failure: they were just SURE that MSN was going to win over this thing called the Internet. They tend to lose when they try to innovate because they're so damn sure they know what people want... then it turns out to be wrong.
I am guessing that Microsoft will beat the Windows horse until it is bits in pieces.
The 15% drop in PC-sales last quarter, that's the numbers they are talking about.
But the real numbers are of course that 92% of desktop users world wide are using Windows. Hell, they could lose almost half their users and they still wouldn't be over.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
There's a lot of comments floating around which say "when you install this this 3rd party start menu and make it boot straight to desktop, it's fine".
What they are saying is that if you undo all the big ideas that were added in Windows 8 it's fine. That's not good, you know.
To me 10.04 of Ubuntu was a perfect desktop. It had everything I needed, I had it set up so sweet and when people running windows saw it they were absolutely blown away. I don't know but I believe that eventually the UI, once it fits your needs, is done. Why change what works? Linux could certainly use more work but mostly under the hood. This madness with Unity I never have understood, it seems like Canonical decided to merge the desktop and tablet together and I can't deal with the mess. Maybe when they finish it but probably not even then. You know, at some point things are good enough but these companies still need to sell you something so now they are trying to creat a demand where there is no need.
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.
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.
That's just it.
I don't WANT to have to "learn to adapt".
Especially not for some imbecilic tweaks in the UI that remove functionality and stop me from working efficiently.
For me, time is money. And all the time I have to waste trying to dick around in the new UI, instead of getting work done, is money Microsoft is stealing from me.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
After using W8 for a few months (due to hardware support for a slide scanner) I don't see much basis for all the hate.
Followed by...
Yeah, the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done , but I've learned to adapt.
What more reason do you need.
People don't hate Win 8 because it's UI is so crappy. they hate it because the previous version wasn't crappy and MS ruined it.
All Microsoft needed to do with the UI is *nothing*.
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It used to be you could + and cycle through windows in a predictable manner, so you weren't required to remove your hands from the freakin' keyboard when you're working at 90 miles an hour.
I finally found out wtf they did with alt-tab. Turns out, they keep the first 6 apps in the usual MRU order we're used to (and that's sensible and can be remembered). Then they inject the desktop into the 7th slot (because ignorant people clutter their desktop with all kinds of crap), and then every application after the desktop is in alphabetical order. By window title, I believe.
The most wildly useless arrangement they could think of that still has some sort of order to it. As if I remember my programs by window title, especially when there's absolutely no consistency in titling. Some programs prefix their name with the open file. Some suffix it. Some don't list the open file. So where the program falls in the list may (or may not) depend on what document you have open at the time. One of their stupider ideas, which successfully sabotaged an interface that worked, for the people that knew about it. And there's no registry key to turn off the braindead sort order, either. You can disable it entirely, and go back to program icons only. (And you can set registry settings to change the spacing of the application image thumbnails. 'cause that's what needed to be customizable...)