I think the bigger problem is all of the point of sale systems that run XP. Many of those will not get upgraded until they are no longer functional!
Most POS vendors advise their customers to be on a 3-4 year upgrade cycle. Those XP based systems should have been trashed already. This isn't complex like the XP case this is just the customers not following vendor instructions.
. I'm a little out of date about commercial Linux vendors but as of a few years ago, no commercial Linux distributor offered indemnity because they couldn't.
Novell (Suse) offers this since 2004 Oracle since 2006 Redhat since late 2006
That being said I don't see the problem with Linux.
Nobody has successfully proven a patent infringements in Linux.
Microsoft reported $2b last year in Android related patent claims. I'd love to know what patents Linux is violating but I'd say that to a great extent they have been proven at least enough for large companies to write some large checks.
Unix isn't more secure than an embedded Windows system they are roughly on par. If your goal is security why use a Unix at all and not a capability system? You can get secure operating systems which support the Linux tool chain (for cheap development). I can't see why you would switch from a moderately secure system to another moderately secure system if the focus is on security.
Incremental improvements in Sharepoint and SQL server are to be expected from Microsoft. In that time MySQL and Postgres exploded in capabilities, while DB/2 and Oracle kept their position as go-to for the top end databases.
Innovation in that sense takes decades to make it into products. The big innovations have been things coming out of research.microsoft.com like LINQ. As far as SQL server and top end that's just not true anymore. SQLServer has passed DB2 for data warehouse and even Oracle is threatened. If by top end you mean stuff with 1000+ drives of information then sure, but that's a classic retreat to quality.
ng to produce a worthy successor to XP
I'm not sure how Windows 7 isn't a worthy successor. All XP did was add some compatibility to Windows 2000.
Losing IE's share to the upstart *Chrome*
Microsoft won the browser wars with IE 6. After that they diminished browser capabilities and kept software on the desktop. More or less they stopped the move from cloud for about dozen years. That's a huge win. Meanwhile IE's share has gone up from 30-60% in the last few years as they've started improving. Chrome as of today is nowhere near IEs share.
watching MS Office erode to LibreOffice and fail to create a reasonable alternative to Google Docs for collaboration.
You are behind on that one. Microsoft introduced simultaneous editing in 2013.
but overall this has been a dark and losing decade for MS.
That's just not true. Their server division and business division have exploded. Even Windows division has well more than doubled. The revenues are way up.
There are now huge opportunities for them in non-cloud based data management. They have all the parts to do an awesome job at data self-determination control and privacy, but they're not even trying to move in that direction.
What do you mean by "non-cloud" here?
Meanwhile I find myself migrating from Windows to Mac because FOSS development tools on MS are becoming too alien to use properly on their platform.
That's why I switched to OSX in the 10.1 days. Having a native Unix environment is terrific for FOSS tools NQA.
What are you talking about? In every industry substitution is used.
butthurt, fanboys, winning team? As far as I can make your comments... Apple for 5 1/2 years running they have over 85% (often in the 90s) of the profits from x86 laptops sales. In what possible sense did they get spanked. Tandy, Wise, Commodore, DEC, ICL, Memotech... How many of the companies from when Apple and IBM were competitive are even still around other than Apple?
Why GNOME decided to use GiMP toolkit I don't know.
Because they wanted to get Gnome 1 out very fast before KDE pulled too far ahead as the standard GUI for Linux. They were under tight time pressure and starting from behind.
Digia is a consulting business that does custom work. They have a different revenue model than Trolltech. Trolltech built up IP value till they got bought. Digia is primarily selling labor.
Not being GPL compatible was a problem since KDE was GPL. Debian legal was where the "FUD started" and because they had serious questions about whether any 3rd party deployment wasn't a copyright violation under the mixture of licenses. I think RMS made this much more hostile and heated than it needed to be, but let's not pretend there wasn't a serious underlying issue.
Most of this isn't true. Microsoft did tons of innovation (I'm assuming by innovation you mean products with new features) in their enterprise applications over the last decade. Sharepoint is much more powerful than it was in 2000 and enhances Office tremendously. SQL Server is now a big player all the way up to data warehousing..
Where they weren't innovating was home / small business and that's what's changed with Windows 8.
Apple, allow me to use 3rd party app stores, give me a decent built in file manager, give me something like AirDroid(and not iTunes), allow script languages, and let me customize the "desktop"(widgets, no Win95 like icon grid), and I will become a full fledged Apple fanboy and shower you with money
Apple wants individuals on supportable devices. What you want is doable with the developers SDK or a jailbreak.
There are not inventories of that size for Samsung devices. Channel inventory matters but there is no backup. Assume that sales from Samsung are a pretty good proxy for consumer sales.
You are grossly underestimating people's needs. People consistently choose more expensive word processors with additional features over lesser ones. For decades (until recently) there have been good $35 word processors that competed with Word/WordPerfect/WordStar yet people choose the higher end products. They still 5::1 choose Word over very good free office suites. That's not stupidity that's the need for features.
Just to pick examples. My daughter at 13 did a major project with iMovie. She needed a non-professional fast easy film editing software. My wife uses the fact that quicktime movies are a native format constantly which allows her to seamless move sound and video between applications. I use the Unix environment all the time.
Macs don't have small margins. As for why they think about it, because OSX is an important upsell for iOS. An OSX/iOS user is not only spending quite a bit more, but they are much stickier than an iOS user only. That means potentially the ability to lock up the $400+ phone market for a generation.
Net apps: 55% iOS / Safari, 35% Android + Chrome. Similarly data from retailers showed much more mobile iOS traffic, as well as higher spend per purchase for iOS (likelyhood of purchase was close).
I don't know what the vast majority of Android users are doing, but it certainly isn't contributing to the ecosystem.
Well there has been good research so I can tell you.
Tablets: There are essentially only two large purchase points iPads and $75-150 Android tablets. The $75-150 Android prices are grouped with restaurants. People buy food and there is a guy in the back who loads the Android tablet with TV content. They compete with low end TVs. iPads are used as an application platform primarily.
Phones: You really need to break out by key price points. $500+ $300-500 $200-300 $150-200 $90-150 $90-
Within price points you see similar usage between Apple and Android (as well as JavaVM). The difference comes from the fact that Apple is super concentrated with most sales in the in the $500+ market. They also are about 70% of that market and growing. That market buys lots of applications whether on Android or iPhone. Even in that market though the buying patterns are somewhat different, with Android customers tending to buy lots of add ons within applications... Apple has some share in the $400+ range (60%) but it is a triangle with $300 phones way outselling $450 phones. Here you see far less application purchases for all platforms. As you drop points down to $90-300 you see very little application purchases at all. For example in China people don't even have access to Google Play on their "Android" phones.
You seriously couldn't be more wrong. Microsoft alone does $70b a year. Adobe does about $16b. Total revenue for business applications is over $400b / year. The Apple app store is $10b.
App store has growth but in 2014 they still aren't even close. Hardware revenues are a different story.
I wondered why PCs and phones were even being lumped into the same category for comparison,
Because consumers and businesses have already found them to be semi-substitutable. That's standard industry analysis. TV and Internet entertainment aren't remotely the same thing but they can partially substitute for one another, thus they compete.
Why do Americans insist that they get phones for free?
Because American cellular pricing in the postpay market (the upper 60%) is highly non transparent. Unless you buy cellular service commercially or think it about it carefully or have it explained to you it is hard to understand. The USA postpay market is not like the European market.
Just FYI May 2003 was the first month laptops passed desktops in terms of units (an outlier) and I believe by 2008 it was true for every month in terms of units. At this point we typically see stuff like:
Lenovo: $4.5b laptop, $2.5b desktop / quarter 2003 vs. 2013 USA consumer desktops fell by 50% while consumer laptops rose by 300%. Canalysis and Gartner disagree on exactly when this happened globally but everyone agrees it is true now.
Just as an aside it was also very fast compared to the standard (Netscape) one. Arguably the Microsoft Java VM is what made Java viable for clients and led to the success of Java. I understand why Sun did what they did, in that suit but even in retrospect it is hard to evaluate if they made the right choice.
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Most POS vendors advise their customers to be on a 3-4 year upgrade cycle. Those XP based systems should have been trashed already. This isn't complex like the XP case this is just the customers not following vendor instructions.
Novell (Suse) offers this since 2004
Oracle since 2006
Redhat since late 2006
That being said I don't see the problem with Linux.
That was a copyright claim and then later a contract violation claim. Not a patent claim.
Microsoft reported $2b last year in Android related patent claims. I'd love to know what patents Linux is violating but I'd say that to a great extent they have been proven at least enough for large companies to write some large checks.
Unix isn't more secure than an embedded Windows system they are roughly on par. If your goal is security why use a Unix at all and not a capability system? You can get secure operating systems which support the Linux tool chain (for cheap development). I can't see why you would switch from a moderately secure system to another moderately secure system if the focus is on security.
Innovation in that sense takes decades to make it into products. The big innovations have been things coming out of research.microsoft.com like LINQ. As far as SQL server and top end that's just not true anymore. SQLServer has passed DB2 for data warehouse and even Oracle is threatened. If by top end you mean stuff with 1000+ drives of information then sure, but that's a classic retreat to quality.
I'm not sure how Windows 7 isn't a worthy successor. All XP did was add some compatibility to Windows 2000.
Microsoft won the browser wars with IE 6. After that they diminished browser capabilities and kept software on the desktop. More or less they stopped the move from cloud for about dozen years. That's a huge win. Meanwhile IE's share has gone up from 30-60% in the last few years as they've started improving. Chrome as of today is nowhere near IEs share.
You are behind on that one. Microsoft introduced simultaneous editing in 2013.
That's just not true. Their server division and business division have exploded. Even Windows division has well more than doubled. The revenues are way up.
What do you mean by "non-cloud" here?
That's why I switched to OSX in the 10.1 days. Having a native Unix environment is terrific for FOSS tools NQA.
What are you talking about? In every industry substitution is used.
butthurt, fanboys, winning team? As far as I can make your comments... Apple for 5 1/2 years running they have over 85% (often in the 90s) of the profits from x86 laptops sales. In what possible sense did they get spanked. Tandy, Wise, Commodore, DEC, ICL, Memotech... How many of the companies from when Apple and IBM were competitive are even still around other than Apple?
When MS bought Nokia, Nokia had already sold Qt to Digia.
Because they wanted to get Gnome 1 out very fast before KDE pulled too far ahead as the standard GUI for Linux. They were under tight time pressure and starting from behind.
Digia is a consulting business that does custom work. They have a different revenue model than Trolltech. Trolltech built up IP value till they got bought. Digia is primarily selling labor.
Not being GPL compatible was a problem since KDE was GPL. Debian legal was where the "FUD started" and because they had serious questions about whether any 3rd party deployment wasn't a copyright violation under the mixture of licenses. I think RMS made this much more hostile and heated than it needed to be, but let's not pretend there wasn't a serious underlying issue.
Most of this isn't true. Microsoft did tons of innovation (I'm assuming by innovation you mean products with new features) in their enterprise applications over the last decade. Sharepoint is much more powerful than it was in 2000 and enhances Office tremendously. SQL Server is now a big player all the way up to data warehousing..
Where they weren't innovating was home / small business and that's what's changed with Windows 8.
Apple wants individuals on supportable devices. What you want is doable with the developers SDK or a jailbreak.
Horace Dediu is one of the most respected mobile analysts on the planet. He isn't trolling for attention, he has plenty of it already.
There are not inventories of that size for Samsung devices. Channel inventory matters but there is no backup. Assume that sales from Samsung are a pretty good proxy for consumer sales.
You are grossly underestimating people's needs. People consistently choose more expensive word processors with additional features over lesser ones. For decades (until recently) there have been good $35 word processors that competed with Word/WordPerfect/WordStar yet people choose the higher end products. They still 5::1 choose Word over very good free office suites. That's not stupidity that's the need for features.
Just to pick examples. My daughter at 13 did a major project with iMovie. She needed a non-professional fast easy film editing software. My wife uses the fact that quicktime movies are a native format constantly which allows her to seamless move sound and video between applications. I use the Unix environment all the time.
Macs don't have small margins. As for why they think about it, because OSX is an important upsell for iOS. An OSX/iOS user is not only spending quite a bit more, but they are much stickier than an iOS user only. That means potentially the ability to lock up the $400+ phone market for a generation.
Net apps: 55% iOS / Safari, 35% Android + Chrome. Similarly data from retailers showed much more mobile iOS traffic, as well as higher spend per purchase for iOS (likelyhood of purchase was close).
Well there has been good research so I can tell you.
Tablets: There are essentially only two large purchase points iPads and $75-150 Android tablets. The $75-150 Android prices are grouped with restaurants. People buy food and there is a guy in the back who loads the Android tablet with TV content. They compete with low end TVs. iPads are used as an application platform primarily.
Phones: You really need to break out by key price points.
$500+
$300-500
$200-300
$150-200
$90-150
$90-
Within price points you see similar usage between Apple and Android (as well as JavaVM). The difference comes from the fact that Apple is super concentrated with most sales in the in the $500+ market. They also are about 70% of that market and growing. That market buys lots of applications whether on Android or iPhone. Even in that market though the buying patterns are somewhat different, with Android customers tending to buy lots of add ons within applications... Apple has some share in the $400+ range (60%) but it is a triangle with $300 phones way outselling $450 phones. Here you see far less application purchases for all platforms. As you drop points down to $90-300 you see very little application purchases at all. For example in China people don't even have access to Google Play on their "Android" phones.
You seriously couldn't be more wrong. Microsoft alone does $70b a year. Adobe does about $16b. Total revenue for business applications is over $400b / year. The Apple app store is $10b.
App store has growth but in 2014 they still aren't even close. Hardware revenues are a different story.
Because consumers and businesses have already found them to be semi-substitutable. That's standard industry analysis. TV and Internet entertainment aren't remotely the same thing but they can partially substitute for one another, thus they compete.
Because American cellular pricing in the postpay market (the upper 60%) is highly non transparent. Unless you buy cellular service commercially or think it about it carefully or have it explained to you it is hard to understand. The USA postpay market is not like the European market.
Just FYI May 2003 was the first month laptops passed desktops in terms of units (an outlier) and I believe by 2008 it was true for every month in terms of units. At this point we typically see stuff like:
Lenovo: $4.5b laptop, $2.5b desktop / quarter
2003 vs. 2013 USA consumer desktops fell by 50% while consumer laptops rose by 300%.
Canalysis and Gartner disagree on exactly when this happened globally but everyone agrees it is true now.
Just as an aside it was also very fast compared to the standard (Netscape) one. Arguably the Microsoft Java VM is what made Java viable for clients and led to the success of Java. I understand why Sun did what they did, in that suit but even in retrospect it is hard to evaluate if they made the right choice.
I agree. I don't know if large screen touch is popular or not. I agree though it already exists for some systems and I guess from here we shall see.