“The numbers are coming in on touchscreen laptop sales, and they don’t look good. In May of this year, a report from DisplayBank, a division of market research company IHS, said that only 10 percent of laptops shipped worldwide during the first three months of 2013 had a touchscreen,” Matt Smith writes for Digital Trends.
“And it gets worse. PC sales are plummeting, so whatever slice touchscreens take is part of a dwindling pie,” Smith writes. “That in turn worsens overall adoption, because these market share figures only cover new devices, not the existing base. There are hundreds of millions of Windows users who have existing PCs without touch, and Windows 8 does not and will never provide a reason to upgrade for them.”
Smith writes, “Windows 8’s flaws have resulted in the worst of all worlds. Instead of providing a cross-platform solution, Microsoft bred an operating system that’s not great for any particular platform… This is a dire situation. Instead of encouraging growth in a PC market assailed by tablets, Microsoft has made the situation worse by giving users yet another reason not to buy a new PC… Windows 8 is a failure.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What was that we wrote way back on MacDailyNewsJune 1, 2011? Oh, yeah:
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)… 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)… 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.
Related articles:
Windows 8 continues to flop hard – June 3, 2013
Microsoft offers no apology for Windows 8, promises better with Windows Blue (Screen of Death) – May 7, 2013
Windows 8ista: Microsoft admits failure – May 7, 2013
Microsoft partners say Windows 8 caused ‘millions of customers’ to switch to Apple – April 18, 2013
Stick a fork in Microsoft’s Windows, it’s done – April 17, 2013
Apple Macintosh owns 45% of PC market profits – 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: PC Market posts 11.2 percent decline in Q113; Apple Mac sales up 7.4 percent in U.S. – April 10, 2013
More good news for Apple: Microsoft previews Windows 8 (with video) – June 1, 2011
Wow, where is Microsoft actually still doing well?
Apparently they sold 1 in Lichtenstein last month. The salesman is now on for a Ferrari if he can just sell another but hey MS are willing to take the loss to boast 100% increased sales on the month before.
Microsoft giving away a Ferrari? Isn’t that a bit extreme? The most you’d be getting for being a top salesman in MS is a Ford Focus running Ford Sync, MS’s crapalicious in-car software. I mean look at MS’s top salesman, Kevin Turner, their COO. Now here’s a guy who looks good in a polyester suit.
Well Ballmer, I may not always agree with you but I always appreciate your comments since they are original! Keep them coming!
M$ does well in games apparently, which is ironic since they denigrated the mac for so long as a “toy” inappropriate for “work”.
MS did well in games. They are or have just done the same thing to gamers as they did to PCers: stuck their neck out too far over that Chopin’ block! Kids, errr… Gamers furious about the announced XBox One’s intentional punishment of loyalty for fee based use of legacy games- backstabbing of GameStop, FYE, etc. and lack of real indie app support.
They are gonna burn in hell on Xbox too. (Finally).
Microsoft Olympic Decathlon was the greatest game evar. Granted, it was 1981 and it required two paddles to play, but that was their apex.
But that’s the thing. I thought they were doing well in games, but they only recently started making a profit there. They just kept throwing money down a hole until they filled it. Only thing is, the rest of the company is not going to be making the profits to support that same way of working with the Xbox one.
Nothing, but the MONOPOLY approved by the DOJ/Gov keep Ballmer and his company well fed. Keeps the IT/CIO MS Minions well compensated and guarantees a JOB!
Wow, where is Microsoft actually still doing well?
Microsoft still lords over enterprise businesses who are Windows addicted. Office still rakes in ca$h as well. IOW: It’s a company surviving on its products from the past. Oh, and its equally old ca$h horde. Not-A-Good-Thing. 😥
Microsoft has multiple divisions that bring in over 1 billion in revenue.
System Center, server management software
Visual Studio and Development Tools
CRM and Accounting Software
Sharepoint and Collaboration Portals
Exchange Server (brings in over 2 billion)
SQL Server database software
Skype
This horse is going to die a slow and agonizing death.
Microsoft should make vacuum cleaners. Those need to suck.
Problem for them is, it will suck at sucking, using old legacy hose designs that allow leakage.
The real problem is that if Microsoft makes a vacuum Cleaner, it will really only blow. . .
I like their strategy, I like it a lot!
Ballmer had no idea of the meme he was creating when he uttered those words.
Ha ha ha ha. Posse of clowns.
The Insanely Inept Clown Posse?
(hangs head)
I am very happy at this out come for Microsoft.
A crying shame. Are you there, Ballmer?
Mindshare is crucial if you are to grow.
Too bad for MS that their CEO lost his mind!
Not to worry, Windows 8 will soon be passing Mac OS X in market share, probably sometime next month. Currently, Mac OS X has 7.27% market share, Windows 8 is at 6.96%.
And once it surpases OS X in marketshare… Windows 8 will still be an unmitigated disaster because like 90% of the WIndows userbase won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Whereas most of the Mac userbase is running Mountain Lion.
See the difference?
This is how MS will die. Not at the hand Jobs, but at the hand Ballmer.
Heh … heh … heh … you said “hand jobs” …
Don’t look now. You did too!
There is one nugget of idiocy in the article.
Macs are too expensive for most …
Sigh. Is this is still the prevailing wisdom, despite comparisons for decades showing that Macs are priced competitively with feature-equivalent PCs? “Apple doesn’t make a cheap, bargain Mac” is always stated as “Macs are too expensive”. It’s always been bullsh*t and it still is.
——RM
Sad part is that W8 actually performs better and more reliably than W7. While MS improved the underlying foundation, they saddled the whole stack down with a Frankenstein UI that nobody loves, but plenty of people dislike enough to stick with W7.
But, the roots of this failure trace back to Gates’ monopolistic (and ultimately tunnel-visioned) “Windows Everywhere” strategy. The problem is that they interpret “Windows” as the UI itself, rather than the underlying code foundation. So, you wind up with a proliferation of incompatible code bases that only look the same on the surface.
Otherwise, the same UI got jammed into every type of device, no matter how poorly the Windows desktop interface works on tablets or mobile devices. Icons too small for a touchscreen? A stylus will fix that! The fact that Gates still thinks the lack of a stylus and keyboard on the iPad is some kind of weakness that ensures Surface’s future domination demonstrates just how stuck in the 90s he remains.
It’s like Balmer decided to follow Gates’ tunnel-visioned 90sesque strategy right to the edge of the cliff, and now has to decide whether to take the plunge, not noticing the jagged rocks below.
Contrast this with Apple, which uses subsets of the same code base for both OS X and iOS, but optimizes the UI to address the strengths of each type of device. With this approach, Apple set itself up for rapid iteration and deployment.
Jobs famously once stated that Gates lacked taste; he was being generous; apparently there are a lot of things that Gates was lacking. It is now showing.
Balmer’s mantra: “No one ever got fired at Microsoft for thinking like Bill Gates.”
Ballmer killed Microsoft’s cash cow.
He’s got 4 more top ones to kill before all hell breaks loose. lol
Maybe, but everything that makes significant profit for Microsoft revolves around Windows. Windows 8 as a failure makes everything else topple.
It is not Ballmer’s fault. It is the board and shareholders fault for not holding Ballmer accountable. The bandwagon went by several years ago and they plain missed it. They’ve got Office and a dividend, but what future upgrades of more bloatware can they continue to sell folks to upgrade? There is no real future in sight.
Even Samsung and Google have to rely on each other, as there is no complete integrated full ecosystem solution. Samsung has no OS any time soon. Google has made themselves dependent on 3rd party hardware to get licenses the same as M$ did in years past.
Apple in the meantime, has full blown hardware, software, and OS and is making their own processors based on ARM that cannot be copied….not to mention the app store and iTunes.
Add all this integrated with a TV and you have the coveted living room. And to add a nail to the coffin, the prehistoric
remote issue that noone can solve is already there in the iPhone, iPads, and iPod. Apple is years ahead of everyone else and the media is blinded to that or paid under the table to skew it.
“No compromises.”
In fact just this morning a person wanting to switch sent me an eMail asking for advice. Love it.
I was visiting a customer the other day. Pulled out my MacBook to look something up. “That’s the next computer I’m getting” he said wistfully. Boom. Another one bites the dust.
I’ve sold a lot of Apple Refurbs to switchers who start whining about price. They’re such a good deal. And I tell them that you might pay a bit more up front but it gets cheaper over the life of the product. And you don’t have to watch those “Finally Fast PC” commercials and feel the need to pay fees to have some company repeatedly clean out your infested computer.
A small business owner friend of mine had his Wintel laptop die on him. No problem, he thought. After all, he had “backed up his important files to the cloud”. He bought a cheap Wintel machine to replace his old one, and now is struggling to deal with the horror of Windows 8. Days of wasted time & re-training for that. But the real surprise was he was treated by MS when he tried to retrieve his file backups with a different computer than he uploaded them from. Kinda defeats the purpose of a “cloud” when your server services company can’t even validate you as a legit customer.
I wasn’t the first person to tell him to just buy a Mac and install his legacy Windows programs (Quicken, Quickbooks, etc) and files on it.
What stopped him from buying a Mac in the first place? Three things:
1) initial purchase price
2) fear of file & program incompatibility
3) fear of wasting time learning a new OS.
Ballmer handed Apple the perfect opportunity to overcome #3 with a simple sales campaign. Hell, just show a 30-second time-lapse video showing two experienced Windows users side by side, each looking at a new OS for the first time: Win8 on the left, a Mac on the right. Is there are reason Apple didn’t think of this when Win8 was released?
And it seems nobody knows why Apple isn’t more aggressive in overcoming #1 and #2 with some advertising and occasional promotions.
Thank goodness my buddy’s wife put her foot down on the tablet purchase. She loves her iPad while he’s driving himself mad with Win8…
This was written by The Eleventh. Sad to see him go.
You forgot the last bit:
AND NOBODY CARES!