“If you’ve been in the technology industry for more than a decade, you remember the Wintel world that was: PCs from Hewlett-Packard and Dell reigned, Windows was the only operating system that mattered, and the Wintel duopoly would live as long as Rome,” Galen Gruman writes for InfoWorld. “In 2005, the still-struggling Apple dropped the PowerPC and embraced Intel chips; about the only sign of trouble was IBM getting out of the PC business, selling it to China’s Lenovo — but that was framed as the fall of an American icon that was stretched in too many directions and the concurrent rise of China, not related to the PC itself.”
MacDailyNews Take: A hearty few foresaw that the Dark Age of Personal Computing was drawing to a close:
As we have always said, even as many short-sightedly waved (and continue to wave) the white flag, the war is not over. And, yes, we shall prevail… No company is invincible. Not even Microsoft. — MacDailyNews, January 10, 2005
“Then it all fell apart,” Gruman writes. “Of the three Wintel hardware giants, HP and Dell seem destined for the dustbin of history, though they can persist as is for years through a slow decline. Intel may — or may not — turn around, Apple-like, by conquering new markets. It’s flailed for years but still keeps trying, with the advantage of having retained an innovative engineering culture that Dell never had and HP long ago jettisoned.”
“Both HP and Dell are chasing after the market, not trying to figure out where the market is going and trying to get there early enough and good enough to matter,” Gruman writes. “They’re piloting from the rearview mirror, and that gets you nowhere.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yet again, the visionary Steve Jobs called it:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people… The transformation will make us uneasy because the PC has taken us a long way. We like to talk about post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. – Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010
No in house OS no can do.
Ctl-Alt-Del>DELL
Ctl-Alt-Del>HP
Ctl-Alt-Del>Palm
Ctl-Alt-Del>Nokia
Ctl-Alt-Del>Blackberry
Ctl-Alt-Del>Gateway
Ctl-Alt-Del>Compaq
Ctl-Alt-Del>HRCemail
Ctl-Alt-Del>NSA
Ctl-Alt-Del>DOJ
Ctl-Alt-Del>SEC……. & any ignorant institution who installed such pathetic hardware and software during the dark years.
How is it, that with numerous corporate level breaches/hacks, of high level financial, governmental and corporate institutions, that Microsoft’s name is NEVER mentioned in the mainstream media?
How & WHY is Microsoft obsolved from any and ALL responsibly for such egregious oversight of such a pathetic OS with KNOWN security risks? Hint: Lobby&Bribes. Baffles the mind.
Most likely a result of the EULA for Windows.
I tried to read an online MS EULA once and got about 5 pages into reading it before they disconnected me for taking too long!
I bet it would have taken over half an hour to read the EULA quick, and MS is not interested in people reading it, you just click and sign your objections away!
Intel I have faith in, Dell and HP are pretty much finished.
I am forced to use MS Windows for mid-range 3D CAD work in SolidWorks. It doesn’t work on anything else other than Windows (works in Boot Camp.)
I’ve wondered where will all the high end software move to if Windows starts to die. I suspect Windows will have to exist for decades because of all the locked in software partners. Very smart on the part of Billy Gates.
Yes. Not just high end software, but customized software. Just look at the US Navy, still using XP and paying MS for support, because of legacy software that they either do not want to reprogram or cannot. And I suspect there is a lot of companies out there in this same boat.
Enough roadkill to stock every Burger King and McDonald’s for the next decade.
No trolls so far castigating Cook on his disastrous manouvers at Apple when compared to his digital competitors. Cant imagine why.