And with it is likely to die the institution of the consumer desktop PC. Simultaneously, in the greatest stroke of irony, Linux is left as the "last man standing" as the only sensible choice for an engineering workstation. The Year of the Linux Desktop is upon us, as the Desktop finally dies.
I've wondered for a while whether the market will bifurcate, professional users will need workstations with the ability to install and run applications and everybody else gets a web browser.
I'm picturing something similar, Asimov's "a Multivac terminal in every home". Arguably we have that now a la Google Search, but step it up to "a cloud terminal in every home". A monitor and interface [keyboard and mouse, gestures, whatever] with an internet connection; everything you do and "have"//"save" will be "in the cloud" with little to speak of stored locally. Whilst developers, creators, &c will have a workstation.
IT friends tell me that Office 365 and hosted Exchange are selling like hotcakes. Also remember (faintly) reading at one point that MS made more money off a copy of Android than Google from patent royalties.
I had to crack open some .NET code recently, and I am completely baffled why anyone would choose that platform for just about anything in 2017.
I guess as long as MS can find another vein they can sink the needle into, what happens to Windows is purely academic.
.NET niche always seemed to be in simple SMB intranet apps. Almost any IT guy in a shop that runs windows could setup an IIS server and have a CRUD app running in a couple of days. Getting anything else typically required a separate hire.
I assumed that .NET was still alive and well for SMB. Has that changed?
"I write low-effort quick contemplation pieces like this occasionally, and they seldom earn me fans or new readers: "
The article lightly suggests that windows isn't getting any better, and there's lots of other choices, and office won't protect windows sales like it once did.
As long as people keep handing more and more power to microsoft, I'm not sure Windows is going to die any time soon. They figured out that apple and google make lots of money on controlling what apps can go on a phone, and selling customer data to advertisers (in googles case, your eyeballs on search.)
It's no mistake they're giving their new software away for "free." They're not stupid, they're going to monetize you one way or another. Like the nice advertisements in your file explorer for cloud storage, or in your start menu for minecraft...Your OS advertises, tracks, knows what software you're using, when, how, and wants to make money on you. :(
What the fuck are you talking about? Windows Phone revenue last quarter was only $5 million, which is a couple orders of magnitude off from being 4.5% of their total revenue for the quarter. At that rate, Microsoft is selling about 5 thousand phones per month, globally. It's not even on life support at this point, it is stone dead.
Just to give a comparison for how poorly Microsoft is performing in the handheld space: In the time it takes Microsoft to sell one unit (on average), Apple sells about 5,000 units. Microsoft sold about as many phones in an entire quarter as Apple sells in about 45 minutes.
