“The idea of ‘the death of the PC’ is just that — it’s an idea,” Matt Baxter-Reynolds writes for ZDNet. “It’s a hook that, if you believe in it (and I do), it can be quite informative about what seems to be happening to the PC industry, and the wider computer industry in which it sits.”
“I don’t think the PC is dying in a literal sense. The PC is stonkingly good at the things that it does well. But I’m a technologist — I’ve been using PCs since I was twelve years old and I like the power and flexibility,” Baxter-Reynolds writes. “But most people do not like the complexity that comes with power and flexibility. Some people just want to give their parents a box that lets them have a video call with the grandkids from time-to-time, and don’t want to have to futz around configuring anti-virus software.”
Baxter-Reynolds writes, “Microsoft needs to abandon Windows on Consumerland tablets and get Nokia to build a 8″ Windows Phone based tablet running on Windows Phone 8. This lines up with how Apple and Google build their post-PC operating systems. It would also technically be ridiculously easy to do. Good prototypes of such things I am willing to guarantee exist in a lab somewhere. But for Microsoft to make this happen, they’ll have to admit one thing. Namely that Windows as a post-PC operating system is dead.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Windows started to die the day Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone out of his pocket.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Steve Jobs finally defeats the PC – from beyond the grave – May 16, 2013
Apple’s Steve Jobs killed the netbook – is the PC next? – April 16, 2013
Steve Jobs’ revenge – April 12, 2013
Microsoft’s stock takes beating after putrid Windows PC shipment reports – April 11, 2013
Apple Macintosh on the rise as Windows PC market plummets – April 11, 2013
Gartner and IDC trumpet wildly incongruous Mac unti sales estimates – April 11, 2013
Gartner: PC Market posts 11.2 percent decline in Q113; Apple Mac sales up 7.4 percent in U.S. – April 10, 2013
IDC: PC shipments post the steepest decline ever in a single quarter, down 13.9% in Q113 – April 10, 2013
Apple iPhone: Steve Jobs’ Revenge – June 28, 2007
Windows dead? No.
It’s going to be as Steve jobs said. Cars and trucks
Windows will dominate the enterprise and gaming world. You need trucks for that.
While apple will dominate everything else
I wouldn’t count on MS continuing to dominate the enterprise and gaming world.
Apple doesn’t do enterprise and they don’t do gaming.
Apple doesn’t do high-end professional gaming. I’m sure a case could be made that iOS is the #1 gaming platform in the world. (And who knows, maybe Apple will release a TV with iOS apps!)
iOS games are casual games with poor graphics and no physical controller.
Time wasters.
If you want to really game, you need a windows PC, High DVD Mac , or a console
Games are a waste of time.
I too personally have no use for games. I’m a musician- very time- consuming. Even my wife is jealous. GarageBand, Logic, or just my ears and guitar.. Who needs games?
If you aren’t playing life as a game, then you aren’t having any fun. Who wants to have a life where there’s no fun and no play? Every society plays games, every single human society. Most do not confine all their games to children.
Right, games are great, except for wasting time on video, computer, or console gaming. Sorry I didn’t qualify it.
@Silverhawk1 et al.
Spoken as a non-gamer. It may surprise you to know that the video game industry exceeds the Hollywood industry in entertainment dollars, is maturing as a story-telling medium, and is poised to vault out of the perceived cultural niche it had been forced to inhabit by non-participants; even film critic Roger Ebert was forced to reconsider his flip dismissal of gaming by the flood of reasoned, articulate responses to his blog.
Over a third of gamers are over 36, and games themselves are diverse, with some of the most profound experiences found in so-called casual games.
Games have established a place along simulations in the arsenal of training methods in flight school and military academies. Universities have developed critical theory curricula for games, their evolution, and their place in the panoply of human values.
Games are known to possess therapeutic value, and playing them can stimulate neural regeneration as well as increase positive affect in the elderly.
This represents an area of computing that promises to change society for the better, once its principles are understood by more people that don’t play games and who can learn not to believe the shallow stereotypes finger-painted by the mainstream media.
Eating Cheetos and fiddling with your thumbs whole sitting your plump ass on a divan is much different from playing basketball or football.
agreed….well except chess and baseball and scrabble and poker and, I waste a lot of time.
But, you waste it brilliantly, as Samuel Johnson once said 🙂
what a dumb you are. don’t tell us what game is bad. it’s only your case. game actually helps to improve my brain activity, and more. only what you misunderstand is that people play it exceedly too much. anything if you do too much, it is bad no matter what it is. game industry is huge. you have no idea.
Edward you are exactly right
English, please.
Hannah
That 2/3’s under 36 are a generation growing older in a basement. I’m not a video gamer and never will be. I’d rather curl up on the deck with Mrs silverhawk1 or red a book if I want to be alone.
Geez edward. I hope you’re being sarcastic, but I don’t believe so.
I’m not trying to turn you into a video gamer, I’m trying to get you to refrain from disparaging those who do. It’s one thing to extol the virtues of a single companion, a cosy fire and a good book; and another to stereotype an entire online community of people as largely adolescent basement dwellers.
BS and plain dead wrong. Games are no more a waste of time than reading a book or playing a music instrument (I do all three). You may not like playing games but your statement is just obnoxious!
Agree with your post. Sounds like an elitist comment to me. I play an instrument and therefore an artist while looking down his nose on someone playing, I assume, kid games. It’s all good …
Home PC gaming is probably one of the worst things to happen to our society. Bad for intetprdivel communication, bad for behavior, and terrible for health.
Games are great. Grab a basketball and go to the park or meet up with some friends and play cards or a board game but for god’s sake get off your butts and get rid of your Dell game machines.
You are 100% correct. iOS games are a joke and lame to control. However Apple are allowing gamepads to be developed for iOS, interested to see where that goes.
Apple didn’t do phones either.
And what happened?
I have almost every console made, ever.
Including a PS3 Xbox 360 and Wii
I have a high end 27 inch iMac and a gaming PC.
I hope to replace both gaming PC and my iMac with a new Mac Pro when it comes out
Good luck with that. The GPUs we suspect will be in the new Mac Pro are for professional use, and not suited for gaming. If AMD or nVIDIA make gaming GPUs for the new Mac Pro, they’ll be heads and shoulders more expensive than their PC equivalents thanks to them having to do custom design for a niche (expensive Mac Pros) within another niche (Macs, which except for the Pro you can’t buy separate GPU cards for anyway).
Did you really just say Nintendo makes the best consoles? When was the last time you played a video game? 1996
If you are talking the Windows platform regarding gaming… you would be correct…
It’s all about dedicated consoles and tablets… and to some degree phones/phablets…
MSFT was smart to build a box(Xbox) for games…
Windows in enterprise will continue to exist… as has forms of UNIX and Linux…
It’s dead in the sense that nobody outside of Microsoft will care about future versions of Windows. I think Windows 7 will be remembered as the last good version. Even if Windows 9 has amazing features, they will be lost in all the attention given to mobile computing. Microsoft will still sell large numbers of Windows licenses due to sales of new PC’s.
I feel that way already.
Haha, my sympathies. My son is GregNotCraig. He gets that all the time.
That’s kind of the way I feel about Lion and Mountain Lion. Snow Leopard was the last, good version.
I don’t dislike Lion and ML not saying they are bad, but Snow Leopard was the most logical, intuitive, straightforward, productive OS out of Apple, EVER. And I’ve used Macs since 1984.
Me thinks someone needs to look at iOS gaming statistics.
Windows won’t dominate anything anymore. This is a new world of BYOD and choice. Even in the enterprise, while Apple has no appreciable back room products, Macs slip right in on the desktop, and even that is starting to be increasingly iOS.
Interestingly the sea change seemed to start at the top with certain highly placed executives who arrived in their positions with more tech savvy than their predecessors, and refused to knuckle under to the IT ministry of truth. As a result IT begrudgingly supported Macs in high places, and this heresy slowly spread across the enterprise.
I believe that the MS hegemony got established only because of time and place. During the dark age when people feared technology, the IT shamans and pundits ruled, and dictated our choices. The USSR fell in 70 years—how many pundits insisted that would never happen in our lifetimes? Tech nerds don’t seem to read, or appreciate, history, except as spurious evidence to support their cause, which is to stay in business even at the expense of everyone else’s welfare.
Silly, naive thing to say.
Very few in Enterprise computing will need a PC. Most users will do more, better and more easily on tablets.
Yeah… have you ever tried to be productive on an iPad ? Whenever I do I get frustrated and go to my PC to get it done. Safari crashes on several web pages and always when expanding too many disqus threads on every disqus site I read !
I’ve always thought a PC was too clunky, complicated and overpowered for the few tasks the average Joe needs to do.
Yep.
It used to be you needed a full on desktop or laptop to do even basic tasks.
Not anymore
Exactly
Microsoft’s not dead but it’s beginning to smell funny.
That’s Ballmer; ever see that guy sweat?
That smelly chair needs to be THROWN! it’s got BLN all over it!
Windows will never die, just like OS X will soldier on.
The real problem for Windows and Microsoft is that we are moving to a mobile world. Combine that with the fact that the need to update or upgrade PC hardware every couple of years simply isn’t there anymore. Buy a decent laptop/desktop today and you won’t need to buy a new one for 5 years, if then. The only exception is if you are doing very high end, processor intensive work, and those folks are few and far between these days.
Added to what I also said about basic stuff.
I know so many people who are still on p4 dells.
Even a 8 year old PC can still do every basic task just fine.
So no one sees a reason to upgrade.
When these machines eventually fail. They’ll buy another cheap windows PC or an iPad
Well, Microsoft might not be apple.
But they aren’t nearly as stupid as Ford or GM
I agree with the MacDailyNews Take and windows is dying slowly. I do not see them changing or if they do they will wait until it is way to late to recover with death being imminent.
And Microsoft isn’t Washington s most important company.
That would be Boeing
And Boeing is crumbling.
No it’s not, their one of thee adding aerospace companies in the world
Ha! With all the problems Boeing is having with the Dreamliner, everyone will be buying Airbus.
Well, those who haven’t already…
The Airbus has had some spectacular failures. Consider the catastrophic crash in San Francisco where everyone onboard should be dead, and if they were on an Airbus I bet they all would be. But lucky for them they were on a Boeing craft so all but 2 survived and 1 of the 2 died because they got run over by a fire truck. Almost 300 survived. I would rather fly on a Boeing jet 1000x out of 1000 over a dangerous Airbus.
It’s pretty funny that you say Airbus has had spectacular failures and then hold up a Boeing crash as an example. Still, the crash in San Francisco had nothing to do with the airplane and everything to do with the human pilots.
I think he was pointing out that boeings are generally built to a higher standard than An airbus
True it is often pilot error, however once that happens, and it always will eventually, then it’s up to the well thought out structure, integrity, and built in safety features of the plane to hopefully save your ass if there is any chance to save it at all. As it was with the SF example. In some cases ain’t nothin’ going to save your ass!
Considering the “DreamLiner” debacle, Boeing is certainly not headed in the right direction. Remember, the real Boeing designed, built, and delivered the 747 in less time than the 787 has been delayed.
This is what Boeing gets for letting McDonnell-Douglas pull a reverse buyout on them.
Yes, the dream liner has been delayed and has had issues.
But it’s the most advanced pasenerger plane in the world. Not a simple machine.
When was the last time Boeing had a new plane crash into the forest at the Paris airshow?
To me, I am dead to Windows and whatever Microsoft does, including the X-Box. I would rather buy a Sony PlayStation 4 rather than an X-Box One, that’s how much I hate Microsoft.
I realise now how much of a dupe I have been to Microsoft’s blandishments of a better OS around the corner. Always with MS, the next iteration will solve whatever problems are found in the current issue of the software. These are all lies pumped out by MS PR department, as far as I’m concerned.
When I found Apple, through the iPhone 4, I discovered a whole new world, a world where quality meant something, both in hardware and software terms. Moreover using OS X is much more pleasurable than the clunky Windows interface and to me, that is worth its weight in gold.
I believe I am not the only recent convert to Apple. There is an army of millions marching behind me, an army who has rediscovered what it means to be using quality software, not the dreck that Microsoft dishes out. And this army will forever remain Apple, so that is a big chunk out of MS’s user base gone.
The only people clinging on to an MS monopoly are the IT doofuses but that’s only because MS insures job security. The sooner MS is dead, the better we’re all off.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing …
A little snark is a wonderful thing? …
Great personal testament and repeated all over on a daily basis.
Cornell U. is just puttin’ the finishing touches on the new Bill and Melinda Gates Hall. So Cornell will be pushin’ the PC ‘n’ Dell shit on employees for many years to come just to thank Bill for his deep pockets.
I liked my iPad1 as well until Apple decided to stop supporting it so soon after I paid over $700 for it. They won’t even release patches to fix iOS5 for F’s sake ! Now iPad 2 won’t work on iOS7. I don’t like this planned obsolescence BS !
People are still too dumb to use computers . . . I just got a Facebook message from a friend who upgraded to the newest iMac at the Apple Store, which transferred all his files to it from his old Mac. He posted; “I’m so,excited about the new iMac! Can’t wait to get home and format it!”
Yep, was at the Apple Store this weekend helping a friend choose a 13″ MacBook Pro. She’s stuck using a PC at work, likely a Duh-hell, but certainly not even in the running as a choice for home use.
Washington wouldn’t turn into another Michigan , they have other massive companies Around like Boeing.
Microsoft and Boeing aren’t going anywhere for a long time.
Michigan was building mpg boats and cars that rusted out in the dealer lot, and cars that randomly caught on fire or exploded ( pinto ) in the 70s
In the 80s, underpowered crap that fell apart
Same in the 90s
They made shit no one in the world wanted
If I wanted to buy a quality, high mpg car that I can rely on to run well without a lot of maintenance for at least 10 years, do I even have any options made in America? By high mpg, I mean nothing less than 40 mpg, and preferably close to or more than 50mpg.
The only thing M$ needs to do is vote out it’s current CEO.
You know, we all say that: “Ballmer – for as long as it takes.” But in truth I would really like to see Microsoft turn itself around and do some really cool change-the-world kind of stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. We all despise Microsoft for their past underhanded business practices and I would not want to see them rise again by subverting and destroying competition in the way they did under Bill Gates.
But they have in their ranks such talent that has been bottled up and stifled under the stunningly incompetent leadership (?) of Steve Ballmer. I would love to see what that talent could do under new, focused and ethical leadership.
What would be so terribly wrong with giving Apple and Google real competition with great software products? They’re not perfect either. And it would likely motivate then to try even harder. All boats would rise and we’d end up with a better computing experience all around.
If that ain’t the pot calling the kettle black…
Why?
Why not just let them hire on at Apple and do great and wonderful things there? People talk a lot about competition for Apple, but I’m not sure that they NEED competition. They have been pretty spectacular without it. I’m not arguing for stagnation, but sometimes a measured sensible approach with the occasional “shake up the industry” product is just the right balance. With all the talk about giving Apple competition, all I can see is a lot of incompetent competition making Apple look all the better by comparison.
Speaking of dead operating systems, Linux is still less than 1% on the laptop/desktop.
Washington has huge advantages that Detroit doesn’t have: cheap power (thanks to hydroelectric), great universities and a diverse economy that doesn’t rely on any one company — not even Boeing.
Detroid hadn’t elected a conservative or a republican to power since the 1970s, and they went steadily downhill since that time into oblivion run by corrupt unions and the democratic party. The same thing is already happening to California which will follow suit.
They were in power. It’s a pure liberal utopia. And look at the hellhole it became. Truth hurts I’m sure. But you’re a lib and hence clueless.
Spoken like a typical d-bagger.
So you think it’s all the Republicans fault? Your probably right and let’s take a look:
Detroit was ruled by Democrats for over four decades. Republicans were not in power, but THEY ARE to blame.
Democrats control most large city governments elected as Mayor, and state governments elected as Governor. Republicans were not in power, but THEY ARE to blame.
In the 1900s for a hundred years, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress longer than the Republicans. Republicans were not in power, but THEY ARE to blame.
In Obama’s first term Democrats controlled ALL of Washington. Republicans were not in power, but THEY ARE to blame.
Today with the exception of Congress, Democrats control the overwhelming majority of Washington, again. Republicans are not in power, but THEY ARE to blame.
Public sector unions, teacher unions — almost all unions — heavily contribute (50+ years) to elect Democrats at ALL levels of government from your local school board to POTUS. Our school districts are approaching bankruptcy around the country and roads, bridges crumbling. Taxes taking a bigger bite out of our paycheck have never been higher. Earning wages have been steadily declining for years and consecutive months of high unemployment set a record run. Poverty, welfare rolls also have never been higher in history of the U.S. Lastly, we’re certainly not better off today than in 2007.
Nothing like a few facts to point the finger in the RIGHT direction …
/s
I don’t think the failures are party specific. I agree it is obvious that Democrats ruled Detroit. I think there were bigger issues within that went on for too long and denial plus complacency played a role. The root of failure in Detroit and the rest of America as well as world economics is the similarities/derivatives of the Federal Reserve system that many many countries adopted. THAT is the root of all evil…MONEY.
I would seriously rethink ‘party specific’ — while both parties are certainly to blame — does not come close to a 50-50 split.
My examples point out Democrats and their policies have been running the show for the most part and spending obligations are coming home to roost hitting taxpayers between the eyes, particularly all types of entitlement spending.
As evidenced by the California state fiscal crisis and taxpayer funded pension obligations (burden) that played out in Wisconsin, small cities, county governments and states throughout the country happening today and for decades. Another example, Stimulus spending. Follow the money and we find the bulk of spending went to government agencies/workers, impact assessments, connected over-priced contractors and over-paid unionized labor significantly lowering available funding to fix the actual problems.
I agree the root cause has gone on far too long and denial, in addition to the blame game (party finger pointing) created a polarizing no-solution atmosphere currently at a level we have never seen before. When is the last time a politician admitted responsibility for their failed policies and wasteful spending? Answer: The last time an honest politician was elected. And when you rule by executive order, obviously, little hope left for reaching compromise.
The root of failure in Detroit and the rest of America is relatively simple. Whenever you give money to politicians — either through you have no choice taxation, or you want something in return donation. How the money is SPENT is the root of all evil.
Examples: Duplicative government agencies that are funded to solve the same problem, prevailing wage laws, lifelong union contract pensions, white elephant projects back home locals don’t need, want, use and remain vacant — just to name a few. Certainly both parties are to blame and a lot of good has been accomplished. But on the flip side of that coin, much more taxpayer money is wasted on administration and labor costs.
One party has done significantly more spending lately, from the Great Society to the Stimulus and the problems persist. It would have been worse, blah, blah, blah …
Bottom line: We don’t have a revenue generating problem — we have a STUPID SPENDING problem.
@ Michael G
sorry to be so dogmatic, but truth is not relative. you may as well have ended your post after your third word. the ethos of each party is more than an identification bracelet; it is sine qua non.
If Microsoft’s fortunes decline and the economy of Redmond takes a dive, will it be the fault of the local politicians, or of Steve Ballmer?
It’s not the fault of politicians that the Motor City has fallen. It’s the fault of the auto industry. Who has had more influence on the lives of citizens there in the past four decades, the business leaders or the political leaders? Who made crappy cars like the Hornet or the Pinto or the Chevette in the 70’s which gave American cars a bad name for years to come? I still won’t own an American-made car to this day. Look at the history of the big three and you’ll see incompetence and lack of foresight on a Microsoftian-scale. They are largely responsible for the current healthcare debacle the nation is in because back in the ’50s when Michigan politicians wanted to create government health insurance plans for workers, the automakers decided instead that they would offer insurance as a means of attracting better employees. That became the norm across the nation. Well, now they can’t afford to pay for the health care they’ve promised (the ballooning cost of which, by the way, can be traced back to Nixon’s decision to allow health care companies to be private, for-profit entities). I agree wholeheartedly that the unions’ inflexibility often hurt the industry. But I’m not convinced that Detroit would be a business mecca right now if Michigan, and specifically Detroit, had been Republican-lead all these years.
Are you saying the decline of one company makes or breaks the economy in a large city like Detroit? I don’t have complete information to answer for every large company closing in every city going back to the last century.
Certainly has an impact, but this effect has been repeated throughout business history. Gaslights to light-bulbs, Pony Express to overnight mail, telegraph to telephones, horses to cars, typewriters to computers, and so forth. Look at Forth-Worth, TX in the old days and present day, it can be done.
“It’s not the fault of politicians that the Motor City has fallen.” I would think about that one a bit more. Politicians run every city, state, and the federal government since the first vote was cast. They pass all the laws and manage day-to-day operations. They collect taxes to cover operations and in a N.Y. minute raise taxes when they fall short, either because of the economy or faulty fiscal mismanagement/spending, or both.
You do know the mayor of Detroit was in office for 20 years and after he left office the city was in shambles. He built a political machine admiring his friends in Chicago and allowed the city tax base and downtown to decay. High tax rates shuttered local businesses and employers left.
You mention labor unions have hurt the company, absolutely correct. Repeated stubborn strikes, some of the highest paid union employees in history and legions of bloated workforces that are unsustainable because of rising costs.
Big three automakers are responsible for the current health care debacle? Talk about a stretch, sorry. How about the steady and yearly skyrocketing costs of health care and legal insurance premiums for health care providers rising much faster than the rate of inflation. College education has the same escalating costs well above the rate of inflation, but that’s another story.
Of course your not convinced Detroit would be a better business mecca now if Republicans were in charge. I suspect a Democrat supporter, throwing Nixon into the mix. But how do you know? It has NOT been tried.
Actually, this is nothing new. Look around the country now and the majority of Democratic led areas for decades are the most distressed and in trouble financially. Stockton, Calif., Detroit, Scranton, Pa., Philadelphia School District, state of California and more to follow if taxpayer funded pensions and personal/business tax reforms are not enacted.
Employer paid healthcare and pensions were a direct response to government wage and price controls. Instead of paying more to retain employees they had to use other means.
I sense bias. WA is a big state, but is it really economically diverse?
Most would deduce that WA is more dependent on Boeing than MI is dependent on the automakers simply because smaller, more numerous COMPETING manufacturing facilities don’t have to undergo the huge economic swings that the relatively fat slow & happy DUOPOLY aerospace industry is known to have. But now McNerny seems intent to relocate all production one piece at a time to cheaper regions, just as GE essentially abandoned its upstate New York origins.
MI agriculture is dependent on 5 Great Lakes, whereas WA agriculture is largely dependent on irrigation from glacier-fed rivers — and every single one of those glaciers is rapidly receding. Give it another generation before this “climate change” thing hits home. At least WA will have the option of seawater desalination, but its hydroelectric industry may die out. You will need to install more wind turbines in the Palouse Desert.
MS surely won’t save WA, and from what I read, the fisheries have been devastated by decades of pollution and overfishing.
WA does have two things going for it: ports would continue to be busy importing disposable plastic junk from China, and California emigrants will continue to drive up coastal property prices to absurd levels.
What other industry do you have in Washington?
Also, would you please specify what about the universities in WA are in any way superior to the universities in MI? Seems to me there is an institution in Ann Arbor that has the highest percentage of Mac users outside of Cupertino and is consistently ranked in the elite class of global universities in practically all its colleges. I would honestly like to know what the Washington schools have to offer. What do you study out there?
Beef up Windows Phone 8 and put it on a tablet? Isn’t that exactly what Microsoft did with Windows RT? Metro interface? Not actually Windows compatible? WTH? Been done. This guy’s a moron. Meredith Baxter-Birney should stick to 80s sitcoms and Lifetime movies. We already know how it worked out too. Of course, Microsoft tried to bolt it on top of Windows anyway. Windows everywhere=Windows nowhere, but they still haven’t figured that out.
“Windows everywhere=Windows nowhere”
Hopefully this will become prophecy, its a shame that the whole world “Standardized” on that POS operating system, Windows. The sooner it is completely gone the better.
Windows may die, but DOS will live on forever.
The real sadness is that a lot of companies are still using Win XP and older versions of office, as well as newer versions, just because their companies have invested so much of their infrastructure to Winblows and programs designed for it. Now the ideal thing would be to throw every windoze box to the curb and buy all macs and have new software designed and programmed for that, but any business that is any size larger than a real small business would have to spend an inordinate amount of money and time doing that and I just don’t see it happening. They will just stick with the status quo (winblows) until hell freezes over.
As long as Balmer is CEO (long live this CEO) Windows is dead. MS is dead. I’ve said it before – a chimp could have been the CEO of MS during this mans monopoly reign and the exact same results. He didn’t see Google let along Apple in his rearview mirror and yet the MS board keeps him in charge. And Xbox One? LOL. Balmer is a CEO of failure. Hows that reorganization working out Balmer? Please MS keep him in CEO position. Just make sure you don’t own the stock.
if not for Steve Jobs we’ll all still be typing command line instructions (no mouse in sight) on green screen MS-Dos machines….
If not for Steve Jobs, Windows the Samsung of period you mention, would have nothing to copy.
> Microsoft needs to abandon Windows on Consumerland tablets and get Nokia to build a 8″ Windows Phone based tablet running on Windows Phone 8.
That’s a dumb piece of advice… Microsoft already has Windows RT and Surface, which failed even more miserable than Windows 8 and Surface Pro. They already use an interface based on the phone OS.
What Microsoft needs to do is revamp Windows RT (call it something else that does not have “Windows” in the name), and purge the kludge “desktop” mode that was only there to run Office, which Microsoft could not be bothered to make into a touch-based application. Then, focus on it as the one and only Microsoft tablet OS.
Meanwhile, abandon Windows 8’s kludge interface as a failure and go back to Windows 7. Windows 7 was competent, and it was set to become the “next XP.” So, the next major release of Windows should be for Microsoft’s core PC customers, who do not want to use a tablet or wave their hands and arms around all day. Microsoft panicked because of iPad and went after tablet customers while ignoring (to the point of insulting) the majority of its longtime customers. This so-called “PC sales downturn” is the result of most customers NOT wanting to buy a new PC with Windows 8.
But, it’s probably too late…
Totally agree with your assessment. I fear that MS management has neither the insight nor the courage to carry this out. Ballmer already fired the main visionaries and opponents of the Windows Everywhere strategy. I sense the presence of armour fortified by religion, which never seems to go well on the battlefield.
Only Microsloth has to go BACKWARD to get better.
Though I do like Snow Leopard, I don’t dislike Lion or ML and some features I do admit are actually far better in ML than in SL. But SL just felt like all the ducks were in a row better. L and ML just seemed a bit more scattered in User Interface layout and logic. I just like the way SL handles Widgets, and some other things. I hope Mavericks ends up with what was the best of both and goes forward even farther with both in Mavericks.
I would say that Windows started to die when Longhorn cratered.
-jcr
I miss Longhorn. I enjoyed my favorite catch-phrase…
“Longhorn. It’s what’s for dinner.” I think that was during the “Tiger” era.
Windows has been dead from the start – this is all just momentum from DOS.
The only thing that’s kept it afloat is the army of macho IT pros who need a difficult system to maintain to retain their careers.
They are now dead themselves, retired, or at last losing influence in company decision making.
Windows 1/3/3.1/95/98/Me/XP/Longhorn/Vista/8/RT/8.1 they’ve all had significant issues or flat plainly don’t work as advertised, but broken promise after broken promise, that ‘it will definitely work next time’ is finally running thin.
If any other company had a track record as bad as Microsoft, they would have been dead a long time ago.
Ballmer’s left nut, Ballmer’s right nut and Ballmer’s Middle Shaft … what’s next, Ballmer’s rear end?
Ballmer’s Duppa!
My grandmother from the old country would appreciate that one.
Windows started to die the day Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone out of his pocket.
No. PC died when Steve had the Motorola iTunes-phone prototype in his pocket.
MDN is correct. Apple is always working on prototypes in the pipeline.
The iPhone introduced the Mobile Computing Revolution, revolutionized the smartphone industry and kick started the post-PC era.
This is what I have said for a long time.
Microsoft don’t have any success in tablets right now because its confusing and they are doing it wrong. They should scrap Surface Pro, let the Ultrabook take care of that segment and merge Surface RT and WP8 and do like Apple. The same system for both phone and tablet. Don’t be so afraid of letting go if the PC legacy.