. MS could likely keep selling W7 for the next ten years and, so long as it was kept up-to-date with security patches people would keep using it.
That's not true. That's what is driving the move. They have completely lost the high end to Apple. In 2011 something like 90% of all laptops over $1k were Apples. And this has been a steady solid deterioration year after year.
Now on the low side, tablets and smartphones have been cutting into PC sales. Consumers and small business are are decreasing their computers::people ratio and increasing their computer lifespans. Selling 1.2 computers / person every 4 years is very different than selling.6 computers / person every 10 years; that's losing 80% of their sales even assuming 100% of those sales were still Windows 7.
They watched that happening in 2010, 2011 and the first 3 quarters of 2012. It is happening at a slower pace in a more limited way with enterprise desktop.
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Microsoft might very well end up fragmenting their userbase. They may very well end up losing the bottom 3rd, in terms of spend, of their userbase. But for the first time in many years the 2012 mid range hardware has lots of features and a much higher selling price than the 2011 mid range hardware. Windows 8 is much more pleasant with touch enabled Metro apps than with classic Win32 apps. So the next step will be sales pressure moving their developer base over to supporting Metro.... And so on creating rapid evolution. Yes, their customers will be unhappy since their customer base is cheap and conservative. But were Microsoft to do what their customers wanted they face sure slow death.
Shouldn't IT costs be going down as things progress towards the future? Enough is enough!
That's Nicholar Carr's argument. He makes a joke that at the turn of the 20th century CEO was Central Electrical Officer, the guy responsible for helping the company transition to electricity and that IT should be no different than electrical plant a commodity purchased cheaply run by a few guys who report to facilities.
If Nicholas Carr's view of the future is correct, nothing Microsoft does matters. They are in an inevitable death spiral and the difference between the right and the wrong policies are just postponing their inevitable shrinkage by a few years.
There is another view, that most companies are at least in great part in the information storage and manipulation business and those that aren't often have divisions that need to be. They want to be agile and effective in the storage manipulation business. That IT is not a facility but more like mind something that becomes more useful as productivity increases.
Under that view Microsoft's goal is to get their conservative customer base off what is a dying wave and get on the next wave.
If you are in a situation where heads it doesn't matter what you do, and tails it does then assume the situation is tails and play from there.
_____
The customer may find it cheaper to run unsupported Windows 7 after 2020 with a good AV software instead of paying for support. Have you thought about this? There are businesses actively planning to take this route and still use XP with no service packs still.
Yes I've thought about that. My book covers this sort of situation, it what I call in it "under-maintenance". The company can save about 1/2 their total IT expenses for 5-10 years. What starts to happen is that the systems become fragile and don't fit the underlying changes to the business rules. This starts to drive up administrative labor costs. Because the enterprise systems can't be easily upgraded department heads aren't willing to fund IT projects using the enterprise IT. Instead they outsource to 3rd party vendors and huge chunks of the IT infrastructure migrate over the next decade from being enterprise-wide and coordinated to departmental and difficult to integrate. That sends IT maintenance expenses skyrocketing.
Every business still on XP in 2012 will be 2027 have paid many times what it would cost them to upgrade to Windows 7 in exchange for saving the money now.
If enough corps stick together the OEMs will have to keep providing Windows 7 and Windows 2008 drivers well into the next decade. Then why leave?
The OEMs are dependent on Microsoft's QA lab to provide drivers. You think Dell has a copy of Windows 7 in Arabic running Russian language support connected to Bus and Tag card? And lets assume there is a problem between two drivers and it is at the kernel level, what's Dell going to do about it beyond write a nice bug report for Microsoft? Sure some OEMs will have today's hardware at say 1/2 today's prices 10 years from now. But that becomes niche legacy support and it quite profitable for the outside consultants. That's not cheaper it is more expensive. The only reason to end up with one of these systems is because it would cost more to replace legacy applications. No one can stay far behind the curve for what current customers are paying.
The only reason Microsoft's customers think it is this cheap is because Microsoft has been the one absorbing the expenses and not passing the costs through, since they wanted marketshare at any cost. They've changed their mind.
That's a possible outcome, they understand that. I think more likely would be Android 2025 running a VM running a local copy of Windows with no Citrix, that just keeps getting loaded less and less often. Windows apps are still going to suck under Citrix.
But yeah they can lose. They know that. But at least this way they have a chance to win.
5 people in document management for a 300 person company. You all take document management seriously. Yes I would assume you should be using Documentum and integrating it into everyone's workflows so you are right to be upset about Sharepoint. That being said that group should be driving the document authoring policy.
I don't understand the temperature models well but:
a) What percentage of released CO2 gets converted in carbonic acid in the oceans and then absorbed in the rocks what percentage ends up in the atmosphere? I don't think we know exactly how that plays out
b) As we change temperature, we carbon cycles. A lot of CO2 is in earth's plants right now. And of course there is methane trapped as well.
c) There is a lot of potentially positive feedback. Heat melts ice, melting ice decreases earth's reflective properties, which increases amount of heat absorbed....
So yeah we know more CO2 means hotter. We just aren't sure how much hotter. That's what I mean by temperature models are so/so.
In terms of soy, it is a great source of protein. Try chocolate soy in milk, it is like the chocolate milk you had as a kid but super good for you.
That beings said I'm a bit more optimistic than you.. I think we get much much more rain. We get more CO2 and as we learn which plants adapt I think we get that 35% or maybe even more. I don't think we get much erosion. I think we add more land that's usable as huge areas of Russia and Canada come onboard. So I'd put 2:1 or 3:1 it is a net positive... but if I'm wrong the downside is terrible. We end up with a carrying capacity of only supporting 2b or less and that kicks off wars which might do environmental damage that even further lowers the carrying capacity.... And all that doesn't include the salt cycle in the ocean stopping and we maybe get 250m year ago's climate with 10% oxygen from all that frozen ocean hydrogen sulfide hitting the melting point.
The cost of making a complete transition to Linux will not be anywhere near as steep.
Yes relative it still is. Companies are far more addicted to Microsoft than they often realize.
Consider, for what I work on, accrediting a system is a tremendous task. It involves many months of in house testing, followed by months of ridiculous paperwork all to get a nice stamp of approval. Think of the multitudes of people involved in this task, and the associated costs that easily go in the 6 figures and definitely 7 or 8 if they start counting in facility use costs for testing. Imagine Windows forcing OS upgrades every year, or even every other year on those systems....that cost will destroy our business very quickly if we have to accredit on a new system just for the OS. That would very, very quickly drive change in our business.
You would get much better at it if you were doing it on a constant basis. It would just be a simple regression test. That being said I doubt it would destroy the business. Accreditation is unlikely to be even 1% of expenses, I'd assume.
We have so/so carbon or temperature models. Our climate models suck. And our adaption models are total guess work. More or less we don't have anywhere near enough measurable facts.
I think everyone except the hard left and hard right interested in science would support a massive move towards green energy and towards electricity. The whole anti-nuclear hysteria is terrible for the CO2.
BTW look at your Soy article they are reporting 15-20% increased yield. Soy is a weird one because US soy is all Monsanto, we know that plant's DNA really really well. As far as topsoil erosion, I'd assume that would be the case we'd be looking at more like the kind of farming we do in Egypt with a flood cycle loading the soil with nutrients using some irrigation at the end. Moving fresh water around isn't too hard, we do a lot of that already.
Yes and I think that approach makes sense. But SMB is the market most easily able to move to Linux, and thus the market most likely to rebel against Microsoft driving up TCO.
Documentum is way more expensive than Sharepoint. It is also much more hardcore. Documentum to do it right assumes you have a document management department that is staffed and I'm getting the picture your company ain't that big.
Maize is just one crop. I'd want to get a little better evidence that the C4 thing doesn't happen in open air more generally and the mechanism for it not happening. For example, do you need more fertilizer or more water? Is it specific to Maize....?
I agree though that is negative evidence of what people are hoping is a positive effect.
What you are describing is exactly what they want to prevent. They want you on Sharepoint and Dynamics. They want you upgrading annually and they want you upgrading every version of Office. They don't want to enable you to spend as little as you per desktop.
And frankly Sharepoint is a major upgrade to Office functionality.
At this point for enterprise the costs of switching to Linux clients is huge, far greater than anything Microsoft is asking of them. The business community may bitch but no they aren't going to switch.
Microsoft understands people don't want constant change in the workplace. They also understand perfectly well how they replaced DEC, Unisys and IBM in the workplace. And they don't want to repeat history and make the same mistakes.
They need to start ramming changes and integration through much faster.
They took on some big projects after 98, unifying the Windows 2000 and Windows ME codebase. Then a huge number of security fixes. That sucked up years.
Apple has trained their users to always upgrade. So Apple developers can target recent versions of the operating system. Upgrades don't create many problems because developers know they will have to support the new version when it is released.
I think Microsoft wants to change the behavior of this taking years. Which means more staff and more focus. A Microsoft beta comes out and it immediate goes into testing.
For enterprise I doubt it. However tough the desktop move is, moving to Linux for most Windows shops is still tougher. For small business, I suspect that Microsoft is planning on dropping the bottom third of consumer / small business.
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The recovery bootable OS will pay the whole $99 (and that's a one time fee not per user) and get a perfectly valid boot key.
For anyone who builds their own OSes secure boot is not an issue.
. MS could likely keep selling W7 for the next ten years and, so long as it was kept up-to-date with security patches people would keep using it.
That's not true. That's what is driving the move.
They have completely lost the high end to Apple. In 2011 something like 90% of all laptops over $1k were Apples. And this has been a steady solid deterioration year after year.
Now on the low side, tablets and smartphones have been cutting into PC sales. Consumers and small business are are decreasing their computers::people ratio and increasing their computer lifespans. Selling 1.2 computers / person every 4 years is very different than selling .6 computers / person every 10 years; that's losing 80% of their sales even assuming 100% of those sales were still Windows 7.
They watched that happening in 2010, 2011 and the first 3 quarters of 2012. It is happening at a slower pace in a more limited way with enterprise desktop.
____
Microsoft might very well end up fragmenting their userbase. They may very well end up losing the bottom 3rd, in terms of spend, of their userbase. But for the first time in many years the 2012 mid range hardware has lots of features and a much higher selling price than the 2011 mid range hardware. Windows 8 is much more pleasant with touch enabled Metro apps than with classic Win32 apps. So the next step will be sales pressure moving their developer base over to supporting Metro.... And so on creating rapid evolution. Yes, their customers will be unhappy since their customer base is cheap and conservative. But were Microsoft to do what their customers wanted they face sure slow death.
Shouldn't IT costs be going down as things progress towards the future? Enough is enough!
That's Nicholar Carr's argument. He makes a joke that at the turn of the 20th century CEO was Central Electrical Officer, the guy responsible for helping the company transition to electricity and that IT should be no different than electrical plant a commodity purchased cheaply run by a few guys who report to facilities.
If Nicholas Carr's view of the future is correct, nothing Microsoft does matters. They are in an inevitable death spiral and the difference between the right and the wrong policies are just postponing their inevitable shrinkage by a few years.
There is another view, that most companies are at least in great part in the information storage and manipulation business and those that aren't often have divisions that need to be. They want to be agile and effective in the storage manipulation business. That IT is not a facility but more like mind something that becomes more useful as productivity increases.
Under that view Microsoft's goal is to get their conservative customer base off what is a dying wave and get on the next wave.
If you are in a situation where heads it doesn't matter what you do, and tails it does then assume the situation is tails and play from there.
_____
The customer may find it cheaper to run unsupported Windows 7 after 2020 with a good AV software instead of paying for support. Have you thought about this? There are businesses actively planning to take this route and still use XP with no service packs still.
Yes I've thought about that. My book covers this sort of situation, it what I call in it "under-maintenance". The company can save about 1/2 their total IT expenses for 5-10 years. What starts to happen is that the systems become fragile and don't fit the underlying changes to the business rules. This starts to drive up administrative labor costs. Because the enterprise systems can't be easily upgraded department heads aren't willing to fund IT projects using the enterprise IT. Instead they outsource to 3rd party vendors and huge chunks of the IT infrastructure migrate over the next decade from being enterprise-wide and coordinated to departmental and difficult to integrate. That sends IT maintenance expenses skyrocketing.
Every business still on XP in 2012 will be 2027 have paid many times what it would cost them to upgrade to Windows 7 in exchange for saving the money now.
If enough corps stick together the OEMs will have to keep providing Windows 7 and Windows 2008 drivers well into the next decade. Then why leave?
The OEMs are dependent on Microsoft's QA lab to provide drivers. You think Dell has a copy of Windows 7 in Arabic running Russian language support connected to Bus and Tag card? And lets assume there is a problem between two drivers and it is at the kernel level, what's Dell going to do about it beyond write a nice bug report for Microsoft? Sure some OEMs will have today's hardware at say 1/2 today's prices 10 years from now. But that becomes niche legacy support and it quite profitable for the outside consultants. That's not cheaper it is more expensive. The only reason to end up with one of these systems is because it would cost more to replace legacy applications. No one can stay far behind the curve for what current customers are paying.
The only reason Microsoft's customers think it is this cheap is because Microsoft has been the one absorbing the expenses and not passing the costs through, since they wanted marketshare at any cost. They've changed their mind.
That's a possible outcome, they understand that. I think more likely would be Android 2025 running a VM running a local copy of Windows with no Citrix, that just keeps getting loaded less and less often. Windows apps are still going to suck under Citrix.
But yeah they can lose. They know that. But at least this way they have a chance to win.
5 people in document management for a 300 person company. You all take document management seriously. Yes I would assume you should be using Documentum and integrating it into everyone's workflows so you are right to be upset about Sharepoint. That being said that group should be driving the document authoring policy.
I don't understand the temperature models well but:
a) What percentage of released CO2 gets converted in carbonic acid in the oceans and then absorbed in the rocks what percentage ends up in the atmosphere? I don't think we know exactly how that plays out
b) As we change temperature, we carbon cycles. A lot of CO2 is in earth's plants right now. And of course there is methane trapped as well.
c) There is a lot of potentially positive feedback. Heat melts ice, melting ice decreases earth's reflective properties, which increases amount of heat absorbed....
So yeah we know more CO2 means hotter. We just aren't sure how much hotter. That's what I mean by temperature models are so/so.
In terms of soy, it is a great source of protein. Try chocolate soy in milk, it is like the chocolate milk you had as a kid but super good for you.
That beings said I'm a bit more optimistic than you.. I think we get much much more rain. We get more CO2 and as we learn which plants adapt I think we get that 35% or maybe even more. I don't think we get much erosion. I think we add more land that's usable as huge areas of Russia and Canada come onboard. So I'd put 2:1 or 3:1 it is a net positive... but if I'm wrong the downside is terrible. We end up with a carrying capacity of only supporting 2b or less and that kicks off wars which might do environmental damage that even further lowers the carrying capacity.... And all that doesn't include the salt cycle in the ocean stopping and we maybe get 250m year ago's climate with 10% oxygen from all that frozen ocean hydrogen sulfide hitting the melting point.
The cost of making a complete transition to Linux will not be anywhere near as steep.
Yes relative it still is. Companies are far more addicted to Microsoft than they often realize.
Consider, for what I work on, accrediting a system is a tremendous task. It involves many months of in house testing, followed by months of ridiculous paperwork all to get a nice stamp of approval. Think of the multitudes of people involved in this task, and the associated costs that easily go in the 6 figures and definitely 7 or 8 if they start counting in facility use costs for testing. Imagine Windows forcing OS upgrades every year, or even every other year on those systems....that cost will destroy our business very quickly if we have to accredit on a new system just for the OS. That would very, very quickly drive change in our business.
You would get much better at it if you were doing it on a constant basis. It would just be a simple regression test. That being said I doubt it would destroy the business. Accreditation is unlikely to be even 1% of expenses, I'd assume.
We have so/so carbon or temperature models. Our climate models suck. And our adaption models are total guess work. More or less we don't have anywhere near enough measurable facts.
I think everyone except the hard left and hard right interested in science would support a massive move towards green energy and towards electricity. The whole anti-nuclear hysteria is terrible for the CO2.
BTW look at your Soy article they are reporting 15-20% increased yield. Soy is a weird one because US soy is all Monsanto, we know that plant's DNA really really well. As far as topsoil erosion, I'd assume that would be the case we'd be looking at more like the kind of farming we do in Egypt with a flood cycle loading the soil with nutrients using some irrigation at the end. Moving fresh water around isn't too hard, we do a lot of that already.
Yes and I think that approach makes sense. But SMB is the market most easily able to move to Linux, and thus the market most likely to rebel against Microsoft driving up TCO.
Documentum is way more expensive than Sharepoint. It is also much more hardcore. Documentum to do it right assumes you have a document management department that is staffed and I'm getting the picture your company ain't that big.
Sharepoint is not designed to work with just a compliant web browser. It assumes Office on every desktop and Exchange and ...
I understand you spending as little as possible is the order of the day. That's what Microsoft wants to prevent.
Maize is just one crop. I'd want to get a little better evidence that the C4 thing doesn't happen in open air more generally and the mechanism for it not happening. For example, do you need more fertilizer or more water? Is it specific to Maize....?
I agree though that is negative evidence of what people are hoping is a positive effect.
Maybe but that cuts both ways. The growth at current is also being done in a greenhouse. But lets assume it is 20%, 25% that's still a huge increase.
What you are describing is exactly what they want to prevent. They want you on Sharepoint and Dynamics. They want you upgrading annually and they want you upgrading every version of Office. They don't want to enable you to spend as little as you per desktop.
And frankly Sharepoint is a major upgrade to Office functionality.
How did you get it for $15? How do you get it free?
I'd assume they are going to train their user base to upgrade regularly. The same way Apple does that now. Stability will be a thing of the past.
But remember every client ships with hypervisor so you can always run old versions of the OS to run apps that are broken.
At this point for enterprise the costs of switching to Linux clients is huge, far greater than anything Microsoft is asking of them. The business community may bitch but no they aren't going to switch.
Microsoft understands people don't want constant change in the workplace. They also understand perfectly well how they replaced DEC, Unisys and IBM in the workplace. And they don't want to repeat history and make the same mistakes.
They need to start ramming changes and integration through much faster.
Or Microsoft encourages developers to move with the latest OS they way Apple does with OSX. And they force a culture change on end users.
They took on some big projects after 98, unifying the Windows 2000 and Windows ME codebase. Then a huge number of security fixes. That sucked up years.
Apple has trained their users to always upgrade. So Apple developers can target recent versions of the operating system. Upgrades don't create many problems because developers know they will have to support the new version when it is released.
I never understood *why* Microsoft thought new versions of their OS were required to keep up sales.
Because they sell OSes.
I think Microsoft wants to change the behavior of this taking years. Which means more staff and more focus. A Microsoft beta comes out and it immediate goes into testing.
For enterprise I doubt it. However tough the desktop move is, moving to Linux for most Windows shops is still tougher. For small business, I suspect that Microsoft is planning on dropping the bottom third of consumer / small business.