“Microsoft’s chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, took to the stage at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference earlier today to stir up the crowd and discuss Apple’s idea of a post-PC era,” Tom Warren reports for The Verge.
“Turner went on to discuss the company’s upcoming Mountain Lion operating system and some mixed press reaction to the future of OS X. ‘We believe that Apple has it wrong,’ says Turner. ‘They’ve talked about it being the post-PC era, they talk about the tablet and PC being different, the reality in our world is that we think that’s completely incorrect,'” Warren reports. “Turner then went on to describe this new era as a “PC+” period, one that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates predicted back in 1999.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
1. Neither Kevin Turner nor anyone else at Microsoft can hold a candle to Steve Jobs or his predictive abilities. There’s a reason why Jobs was hailed as a visionary genius and Kevin Turner isn’t.
1a. Last we heard from good ol’ Kev was that “the iPhone 4 might be [Apple’s] Vista.” Apple’s iPhone 4 went on to become the best-selling smartphone in history until, of course, the iPhone 4S was launched. Turner thought so much of his company’s product, Vista, that he used it as a point of denigration. This was one year after Turner called Vista “the most secure OS on the planet.” No, really, he did.
1b. All this is irrefutable evidence that Kevin Turner is a batshit insane buffoon who whores idiocy for a shitty, floundering, rudderless company. Obviously, Kevin Turner will do and say anything, regardless of veracity, in order to remain what and where he is.
1c. If the dope actually knew what the hell was coming next, or even just looked at his clown of a boss, he’d have fled Microsoft years ago.
1d. The next time he claims to know better than Steven P. Jobs, we won’t go so easy on him and does anybody at Microsoft have even a smidge of fashion sense? The cheesily-moustachioed Turner makes Ned Ryerson look hip. Oh, yeah, that’s right, at Microsoft “they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste.”
1e. “For the most part.”
2. Microsoft has to cling to the idea that Jobs, of all people, was wrong about, of all things, the future of personal computing, because if Jobs was right, Microsoft is toast.
3. We’re no slouches when it comes to seeing where things are headed, either, and what we wrote ten seconds after we first heard about Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8 works just as well today as it did over a year ago, if not better:
Our initial impression is that Microsoft, in trying to cram everything into Windows 8 in an attempt to be all things to all devices, will end up with an OS that’s a jack of all trades and a master of none (which, after all, ought to be Microsoft’s company motto).
By the time this hybrid spawn of Windows Phone ’07 + Windows 7ista actually ships, one can only dream where Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X will be! For Microsoft, it’ll be more like a nightmare. Perhaps Microsoft will someday put some scare into Google’s Android/Chrome OS, but only time – and a lot of it when measured in tech time – will tell. We simply do not see the world clamoring for the UI of an iPod also-ran now ported to an iPhone wannabe that nobody’s buying to be blown up onto a PC display.
From what we’ve seen so far, Windows 8 strikes us as an unsavory combination of Windows Weight plus Windows Wait.
Not to mention that probably no one on earth knows how much or what kinds of residual legacy spaghetti code roils underneath it all (shudder). Is Microsoft giving up on backwards compatibility? If so, people might as well get the Mac they always wanted. If not, then Microsoft’s unwilling to do what it takes to really attempt to keep up with the likes of Apple or even Apple’s followers. No matter what, if Microsoft’s going to ask Windows sufferers to “learn a whole new computer” (and that’s exactly how they’ll look at it, regardless of how Microsoft pitches it), millions will simply say, “Time to get a Mac to match my iPod, iPhone, and iPad!”
As if they needed it: More good news for Apple.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “thethirdshoe” for the heads up.]
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Just wait for the PC era.
I prefer the -PC era.
Developers will call this the PC– era.
nice… PC
I put in PC plus plus… MDN or iOS wiped it.
Yes, looking forward to the Buggy+ era.
The Microsoft idea is to make the hood of the car look like the rear end of a horse, so you will still be able to use the Buggy Whips that Microsoft makes. 😛
Puke! Darn it, my breakfast (GMT 8)!
How’d Google+ work out?
Another funeral?
Yeah, that’s it. Come up with a sexier meme to cleanly and decisively transform everybody’s thinking and consumption habits: “PC+” is so simple and intuitive compared to the obtuse and effete “post-PC”. It out-Apples Apple. It’s bound to work because, well, it’s all about marketing and mind share, and this will recapture that, and the glory days will return, with a vengeance! Apple has it wrong, and we’ve had it right since 1996, and it’s high time we got to work on that! Real soon now! Just you wait! And if that doesn’t work we have enough money to do some damage, or even just wait until everybody at Apple dies. And if they don’t, we can change our definition of reality once again and nobody will notice because they’re all fools and suckers.
LOL, a post worth of Zune Tang.
Has anyone else noticed that while Apple’s managers look like a bunch of young hip guys, the MS executives look like insurance salesmen.
Plus, watching MS’s decisions over the past few years I’m starting to believe that MS is really being run by a bunch of moles from Apple who are bent on destroying MS. Surely, real executives can’t be as stupid and delusional as MS executives are. Can they?
Yes, they can. And they are… IMHO… “and they have earned it. for the most part”
They started at Microsoft with a mind full of MUSH, now they lead it as CEO and lawyers (with that same mind full of mush goldarnit – D’Oh!).
Its been a long time since I’ve heard a line from John Houseman and The Paper Chase. Damn good series that was. Thanks, I needed that. 🙂
Microsoft: we make money the old-fashioned way—we license Windows to OEMs.
And always will. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be :world without end. Amen.
MS culture is very insular. They have a very strong pro MS corporate culture with a lot of very very serious and pervasive management issues.
There are tons of very intelligent people that work at Microsoft, but it’s not a place where great ideas or innovation can flourish, it’s a place where mid level managers fight among each other for position.
Two serious problems pervade the organization.
1. Windows worship. Everything at the organization revolves around the windows brand. This is already a crippling limitation but there is another.
2. Market share megalomania. They see marketshare and not profits as their key statistic. It has served them well in the past, but going into the future this could be one of the key points of weakness that undoes them.
They could cling desperately to the “Apple is a rounding error” myth until it becomes too difficult to maintain that charade.
This sounds an awful lot like the way things were run in the old Soviet Union where you had party apparatchiks and political officers everywhere making sure that everything was “Soviet” style in everything from industrial engineering and design to the arts. Political officers were indeed pervasive and had absolute veto power over everything.
Just one word, “salesmen”
Don’t use salesman. I’m a salesman, & he’s no salesman.
Well said
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. MS has had the same “vision” of what a “tablet” should be for over a decade, it was wrong then, it is still wrong now. Even after Apple showed everyone how to do it they still don’t get it. That’s insane!
is this Microsoft’s “Just in case you mistakenly thought we know what we’re talking about” week, honoring over a decade of ineptness, crass copying, and shameless inferior products???
What is the definition of a personal computer? I would argue that it is the computer that is with you most of the time, so the demarcation line between a computer in the truest sense of the word is blurred as between a PC in the traditional sense and a tablet in the modern sense. Both are personal computers. To me, the true definition of a personal computer is one that you spend time with the most to do your computing tasks.
The era that Microsoft speaks of, of office drones slaving away on spreadsheets and word processors, is long gone. Gone the way of the dinosaurs. Microsoft has not evolved to take advantage of the switch from office driven consumption to personal driven consumption such as reading magazines, replying to e-mails, reading e-books, playing games and other things that you do on the iPad. And so in the modern era, the iPad has supplanted many of the things you used to do on the PC. Naturally, the definition of a personal computer has morphed into the uses that it is put to, rather than be defined by cubicle dwellers.
Microsoft is like the leading edge of propellor planes at the dawn of the jet age. They both have wings, a cockpit and seat passengers. But the efficiency of the jet engine put the propellor driven planes to pasture because passengers loved the speed and the convenience at which they were transported. And so it is with tablets – they are more personal to us and we make use of them more than desktops or laptops. The tsunami is coming, one that Microsoft is blind to, and one that will sweep it away into irrelevance.
The whole middle paragraph; you can’t imagine a PC world where they do both office work AND play around doing iPad kinds of things on PCs?
How is it that M$ has failed to evolve? Especially where playing around is concerned?
Cube rats all over the world are pretending to work while their employer pretends to pay them?
Besides, one you get past the OS, life’s your cup of meat. Or as they say in the world of Windows, Once you get past the smell, you got it licked.
The central theme to Microsoft’s way of imagining things centers on Office and Windows in their various guises. Having established the dominance of Office and Windows by the lowest common denominator, by which Microsoft measures the utility to the consumer by how cheap it is and by how long the list of features it has misses the point. Steve Jobs showed them the way that cheap isn’t want the modern consumer is looking for but that which combined functionality with a reasonable price. Everyone was surprised when Steve unveiled the iPad on stage for $499, which was a breakthrough price for a tablet. People were expecting a price closer to $1,000. That broke the paradigm of the Apple tax and no one could and still can’t manufacture a 9.7″ tablet and sell it for $499 for the quality of the iPad.
This had the effect of personalising consumption to the level that the iPad was always with you wherever you were – in the office, at home, in the john. This, in my opinion, makes it more personal that a PC because it focused your use to personal consumption and broke the way people approached computing which was task oriented rather than app oriented.
Steve saw the future and the future is now. Microsoft still doesn’t get it and never will because anything that jeopardises the Windows and Office monopoly will be seen as a threat and will be rejected or adopted but with reservation. Steve said that Apple lost the PC wars. Instead of going head to head with Microsoft which would have been suicidal, he practised ju-jitsu and used an alternate force to defeat Microsoft – used Apple’s momentum in mobile computing to change the computing landscape forever.
Yeah, and what’s interesting is that not only are Apple products more affordable than people thought, Apple is actually breaking Microsoft’s back…
It’s like the end of the Cold War: it wasn’t the Star Wars or the containment or propaganda, or whatever, that brought the Soviet Union down, it was the simple fact that the Soviet Union bankrupted itself trying to keep up since it was so internally corrupt and inept.
Apple has its Star Wars programs to be sure, and MS is light years behind. But now we find that MS has to turn 180 degrees and follow an Apple business strategy. It’s astounding. Who would have thunk it…
Read Horace@Asymco on this: it’s not so much that MS is saying they have to come up with a device that competes with Apple because the OEMs are dropping the ball (though that is true, too)… it’s that MS CANNOT survive doing what it has always done!
They can’t get their traditional software and OS margins! Software? No margins? On software? Whoah. OEMs can’t pay them 150 per device and survive. MS has to be content with 30 per device! That is a huge come down, and PC sales are only declining. Oh, no, how to make 150 per device again? Better do an Apple, they get 150 per device. For hardware, not just for spinning out serial numbers, how unheard of! Well, if they can do it, so can we! How hard can it be, right?
Let’s face it, Apple had the eco-system and supply chain built when the iPad was introduced to the market, perfectly placing them in a position to price it aggressively and tank the market for mini-notepads. Steven P. Jobs learned a thing or two in his first foray at Apple and Next. No matter how smart you are, there just isn’t anything that compares to experience.
We all know who Microsoft is, what they do, how they got that way, and why they are who they are, but you can be certain that every Windows consumer on the planet is getting their fair share, even if it doesn’t come through an iPad first!
But, this notion that people who use Microsoft products are missing out on something won’t fly with me, because those bastids (99-percenters) are using up all of the bandwidth downloading Office and Windows from the torrents!
The position is really interesting, PC+….the best of both worlds. However, this is only true of the intel version of Win8 not the ARM version, which will be just as different to windows as IOS is to OSX…actually more so.
So their position well completely stuff them up. “Win8 is PC+ but its a $1000 tablet. The iPad equivelent actually doesn’t support any of the PC+ things that we are lying about like enterprise support…etc etc”
IDIOTS.
I respect Steve, but the truth is his greatest sucesses were refining other people’s ideas. He took the inventions he saw around him and dumbed them down so that anyone could use them. If he was visionary in any way, it was understanding that one day everyone would have a computer in their pocket.
You obviously know nothing about Steve Jobs and are content to repeat the clap-trap of others. Read the bios and do some research before you speak my good man. Or heed the wise saying that it is better to be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and confirm it.
I disagree. More often, when something is made where almost anyone can use it and still produce 80 – 90% in quality if not 100% or much more than the original, then it is not dumbing down the invention – it is making it a boat load smarter.
I disagree with two central points.
First, “dumbed them down” is not the way in which Jobs made things usable. Apple did not “dumb down” the XEROX PARC GUI, they actually improved it a little and did it more effectively (the MacIntosh cost about 5x less). Was the Mac GUI with mouse “dumbed down” over DOS? I guess if you think memorizing commands makes you smart, but it doesn’t. How was the iPhone and iOS “dumbed down” relative to other phones and mobile OSes of that time? It wasn’t. How was the iTunes store “dumbed down” over the failed download stores that existed before it? By actually working and having the right price point?
I also dispute that Jobs and Apple simply “refined” ideas. If you think the iPhone was simply a “refinement” of other people’s ideas, then fair enough. Aside from the fact that the no other company could make a good copy for at least a year, thus demonstrating that they were technically ahead of the curve, it also did two things that were fairly opposite to the thinking of the time: no physical keypad and hardware maker ruling over carrier. Neither of those would have been done by anyone else than Apple. Just as with the iTunes store, these appear in retrospect to be the obvious answers. However, at the time they were against corporate thinking.
One more thing. If you think that mobile devices was the first time he predicted something big, I would refer you back to the Mac GUI and mouse. XEROX had it forever and wasn’t do anything with it. Jobs saw it and understood what computers would look like in the future. Apple made MacIntosh and then WIndows finally copied them on their way to corporate dominance. Bringing that interface to personal computers for consumers was NOT how anyone thought at that time. Again, in retrospect, it seems incredibly obvious, but it flew in the face of the thinking at the time. XEROX took their time and eventually put out a business machine with their GUI and mouse for about $10K/unit.
“Just as with the iTunes store, these appear in retrospect to be the obvious answers.”
Great point. I remember watching an interview with Jonny Ive and he said something along the lines of “we try to create products that work so well that people will say ‘well of course it’s like that, how else would it be?'”
It’s all in the execution. Sorry Thomas, you really have shown yourself to be void of any facts relating to Apple/SJ.
You are an idiot. You don’t respect Steve Jobs, you don’t even have the remotest understanding of what he did.
Microsoft is a shitty company full of liars and cheats. Why don’t you get a job there?
This site needs a way to vote comments off the board.
You’d be gone already, sonny.
I believe that the basic mode of operation for Apple has been to take the fundamental idea behind technical evolution for all of man kind, then use the building blocks (materials and ideas) the refine the most usable devices that are easily approachable by all people (techies and non-techies alike). At D8, Jobs said he wanted Star Trek and as the ideas solidify to working devices we as a species are getting closer and closer to that goal. Just as writers are wordsmiths (innovating works from the 26 letters of the alphabet that we all have available to us) , Apple is a tech-smith (taking concepts from the University researchers and their own bright minds and forging user friendly, hi-tech devices for all). It seems they are the only ones that really have the future of human-device interaction in mind. Everyone else just wants to copy whatever they are doing without actually adding any enhancement to the recipe.
ANYBODY can make something that is difficult to use, unwieldy, time-wasting, inelegant, unintuitive, inefficient, tasteless, and which doesn’t build on learned lessons.
It takes committed genius’ and hardwork to make something so easy to use that it *appears* to be “dumbed-down” because all the work has been done for you.
It is incredibly difficult to make something that a 3 yr-old or a 93 yr-old can pick up and use without instruction. That, my friend, is visionary.
It is highly difficult to make something of which you say, “that is just how it should be, I can’t imagine how it could be any different than it is. Form perfectly follows function.” And yet that is Jony Ive’s goal, time and time again. The very definition of iconic.
It is difficult to take something that is convoluted crap and
detritus such as the Windows OS and merely refine it, yet MS cannot even do that. Let alone start again and re-imagine it into something modern and elegant like OS X and iOS which, making your OS processor agnostic. After how many false starts will MS ever get there?
What you have said only admits that what Apple has produced must be more than mere refinements — for who else has done any of this?
Bell only won the patent on the phone because he beat the other guy to the patent office.
I heard it was because he beat the other guy outside the patent office 🙂
in twenty years, that guy is gong to look exactly like mr. magoo.
I know I’m going to get slammed here, but the truth is…
Right NOW it really is the PC+ Era. (PC plus smart phone, PC plus tablet, or PC plus smart phone plus tablet)
We are in the very, very early stages of the Post PC Era. Very few people (as a percentage of the digital buying world) have completely ditched their desktop or laptop for JUST a smart phone or JUST a tablet or JUST a smart phone and tablet.
When will the Post PC Era really be upon us? Probably late 2013 at the earliest. Very likely some time in 2014. Almost surely by late 2015.
Apple is, I believe, the only company truly at the leading edge of this move to a Post PC Era. Apple is helping to create the future.
Microsoft is stuck in the past and predicts that the entire wold will still be tied to the past (PC+ centric) five plus years from now. Hell, five plus years from now half the people (or more) with smart phones and tablets won’t even own a desktop or laptop machine!
Sure, and it’s only labels, that paleontologists themselves will adjust as new data arrives, to delineate the Cretaceous and Paleozene periods; such data being the fossilized remains of Microsoftius Megalomanius; such boundary marking the K-T extinction event initiated by the Jobsian planet fall. There will be slight overlap of a few fossils, and a lingering academic dispute about the duration of market share, but despite millions of years’ dominance by the Saurians, it’s clearly the Mammals’ turn…
Actually you’re incorrect. MS, Google and Apple have different methods based on their starting position.
Apple started with the iPod and progressed to a phone, using the popularity of this they then went to the tablet and are also using the popularity to sell OSX based gear.
Google has the popularity of the search engine, translated to sales of Android thanks largely to Samsung and are now trying to push crappy tablets and PC’s.
MS has a strength in the desktop and enterprise, this could not translate to tablet sales based on a Win7 OS due to the design of it, it would be like trying to put OSX on a tablet, instant fail. So while Apple and Google started with a phone OS, MS’s best approach to move forward was to do what they’ve done. Short of this they would find themselves cut out of the market all together in 15 years.
Right now the Apple is leading the popularity stakes not the move to a post pc era. The post pc era is a myth, unless you expect the only stationary computers in the future to be servers.
-robert-
I see you not anything close to a visionary, that’s okay others said the same things many times about Jobs predictions, and they where wrong also.
See the lack of looking to the future and falling back to a past gives you nothing but rehashed garbage, Microsoft has done this so many times it’s not even funny and look who is the Top grossing company in sales and worth now, it’s not Microsoft, Google, Amazom, or Samsung, it Apple.
And with the numbers just out shows that anything having to do with a full blown PC is dead in the water, Times have changed and old thinking is gone for any company that wants to move forward.
Oh by the way, IOS is OSX, it has been and always will be, on the iPad we do have a full fast OS, the underpinnings are all OSX, but others that want to complain don’t see it, but then again Apple hit them blind sighted with the iPad that everyone is now tring to take for a ride in copying and design enngenering.
So much for a PC world, and users need to get the quote correct that jobs had stated, not in the snippet that’s used to put it out context..
Quote:
Jobs said the day is coming when only one out of every few people will need a traditional computer.
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.
“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said. “They are still going to be around.” However, he said, only “one out of x people will need them.”
Jobs said advances in chips and software will allow tablet devices like the iPad to do tasks that today are really only suited for a traditional computer, things like video editing and graphic arts work.
The move, Jobs said, will make many PC veterans uneasy, “because the PC has taken us a long ways.”
“We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable,” he said.
They started working on the iPad tablet in 2000, before the iPod was released.
IOS is a subset of OS X. OS X is on every Apple phone and tablet as well as the iPod touch.
Don’t know much about Apple’s mobile products, do you.
Why does the PostPC era have to be characterized by people ditching their PCs for “JUST” a mobile device? Where did that come from?
Anyway, here’s an idea; how about this for a little different perspective: how about, instead of “{PC plus smart phone, PC plus tablet, or PC plus smart phone plus tablet}” we flip it and say, “{mobile device + PC}”?
How about we ask how many mobile device owners (of decent ones like iPads or iPhones of course) use their mobile devices for, say, 51% of their “computing” time? It is easy to imagine this is the case. After all, people take their device everywhere: to meetings, on the train, to the coffee shop, to bed, where ever. Also, individual computing time per day is being extended because mobile devices are fun and are being used for all kinds of new things that people weren’t bothering to use the PC for.
Now think about how iPads alone are selling at a rate of 20 million per quarter. Think about how “PC” sales are declining and how PCs are merely one-per-household kind of devices anyway, not one-per-person kind of devices.
Hello PostPC era! Here we come, baby, woohoo!
Isn’t that like calling cars the Horse & Buggy”+” era?
Ballmer & crew ought to hire me as Court Jester…because I will tell the ugly naked truth; announcements of vaporware and criticism of competitors DOES NOT FLY WITH PEOPLE TODAY.
Consumers read and talk to a lot of other users and they generally know what works and what doesn’t and what products are tops, second tier and BTTB (bottom of the barrel).
MS just “sends in the clowns” and they read a script and every listener just rolls their eyes.
Jobs is always so right… hail Jobs… and Optimus Prime… and my left testicle. Fanboy freaks.
Go troll somewhere else.
@Robert
Blow *e loser!
Trolls are all the same, also they make Great Live Dart-Board fill ins, that the whole family can enjoy.
😉
Another bald headed prick with ears, looks a lot like his daddy monkey boy Ballmer.
Since Ballmer changed the brainstorm meetings into head slap sessions, no one has got any hair left.
Microsoft spent years trying to get their idea of a Tablet PC off the ground, and then Apple showed them how to do it right. Have they learned anything? Of course not! They’re just trying to argue that the world really wants what they already failed to sell!
-jcr
Ok, that sounded too smart. No wonder you don’t work for Microsoft.
Microsoft primarily has a failure of top management (ala Nokia, Moto, RIM, Palm).
I think they truly have a lot of top employees, who are throttled by the likes of their overlords.
In the mid 90s, I picked up a writing gig at IBM. At the time, IBM was transition away from hardware design and manufacture and more towards services. The culture clash was breathtakingly harsh. On the one hand, there were the old guard versus a new business-focussed crop of up and comers. The old guard were openly hostile and critical of their brethren who were very generous in paying them back in kind.
Where I am going with this is that there were truly huge losses coming (the beginning of the end for OS/400 and a host of other products just disappeared) and many layoffs. People became more exaggerated in their personas and much nastier. People were not just outspoken, they were vitriolic. It started to become a blood sport in some ways.
And, I think that Microsoft is headed the same way. They will post huge losses despite really good cash flow from their core business; they will continue to waste time, money, and effort on products that don’t get off the ground. Their truly horrible ranking scheme has paved the way for a hyper competitive behaviour which, like the schoolboys in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, will transition from the games that boys play to truly cruel and punishing behaviour practiced without remorse or pity by the banal and the disenfranchised.
“Turner went on to discuss the company’s upcoming Mountain Lion operating system and some mixed press reaction to the future of OS X.”
As misguided as Microsoft is, Turner got that one right.
Considering the extremely mixed press that Windows 8 has gotten, this Kevin Turner probably shouldn’t be throwing stones.
What is there to discuss? What were we expecting from Microsoft? an omission that they are screwed and not long for this world?
Of course they are going to try and spin their fast approaching extinction into something that makes them sound relevant. What choice do they have? lol
I yearn for the upcoming MDN articles “Beleaguered Microsoft [considers selling itself | files for bankruptcy | share drop to penny stock market | Windows market share plummets to single digit | Apple now worth 20x of MS | etc ]
I really hope that MS does mankind a favour and goes out of business until 2020.
Come on Balmer. Spend some more cash on stupid acquisitions. And you definitely need far more committees, focus groups, the lot. You really need to introduce musical chairs on a daily…no hourly basis to decide who needs to get fired. Productivity will skyrocket for sure.
PC era is “PC declining Market share” yup, once again Microsoft leaves us to fill in the missing parts.
The author of this article does not understanding what concept Apple refers to when saying Post PC era. It refers to the fact that today people are going more mobile than ever before, not having to be tied to their desktop computers (i.e., the PC by Windows or the Mac). It was not meant to be a jab at Microsoft that it is the Post [Microsoft} PC era— not it at all. Of course, the PC will never go away (as Steve Jobs has also mentioned at AllThingsD), nor should it, since there will always be “cars” and “trucks” to suit your needs. Get a grip.
Aye aye aye he sure stired up the pot! Steve Jobs was NOT a visionary and either was Bill Gates. Both took on the task of evolving products and concepts that already existed. Noting wrong with that as last I checked we would all be driving Mercedes Benz…. Listen SJ was not a Messiah or Prophet but he was smooth as silk and a great raconteur and yes Apple products are nice (I own a lot of them) but they are pricey hence not suited for the masses.
Like inventing the WHOLE PC industry with the Apple 1/II was not visionary.
My ass. You know nothing. In particular not what visionary means.
Only just found this forum, I’m a mac user but all I can say is this place is full of idiots who are so hung up on the apple brand they have lost their ability to think. I see alot of people judging windows 8 simply because its a MS product, knocking MS on their employees dress sense, any of the critics here actually tried the win8 preview?
Honestly reading the comments here I’m ashamed to be an apple user at times. MS still has the biggest market share, they have a new OS that has been getting great reviews. Describing MS and dead is nothing but Fandom and idiocy, practically every business on the planet still is based on a microsoft, in fact overall they still have at least 80% market share, and in the business sector its still more like 98%. Get a grip guys, honestly I swear people here have spent too much time jerking off over an apple logo and have lost perspective, I use apple because I enjoy it, but I’m not brain dead just yet.
Stuart, lighten up. You haven’t been to many forums, have you? Particularly Windows or Android centric ones. The posts here are actually quite cogent, intelligent, logical, playful, thoughtful, and respectful of the “other side” in comparison.
Microsoft’s market share is what it is because business is entrenched with them from the old days when they got a foothold when Apple was in the Dark Days. Change is hard for large companies.
Individuals buy PC’s because they only have $300 to spend, not because it’s a better computer. I’ve set up switchers with cheap previously loved (as the car dealers put it) Macs, and every user said the old Macs run faster and more reliable than the newer PC the Mac replaced.
I haven’t tried the latest versions of Windows but I know those who have (due to being forced to use PC’s at work) and they find them kludgie and non-intuitive to do anything.
I don’t dislike products just because Microsoft makes them. Microsoft’s reputation was tarnished by the poor products they’ve continued to develop. Not the other way around.
@Stuart
You come here, call everybody an idiot, and then proceed to act as a shill for Microsoft.
Oh yeah, you’re a Mac user and not at all a troll, definitely.
I think Stuart is suffering from a severe case of brain farts.