Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.
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If this calculation proves true, one would think losing close to 1/3 of its customers would cause M$ to rethink some of its business policies/plans…
Such as forcing folks to retire perfectly good hardware and buy new if they wish to run Windoze11.
But then again, it’s M$… 🤷♂️ 🤦♂️
1/3 of its Windows customers, not of all of its customers. I bet they still make plenty of money with Azure and Office 365.
Precisely. Windows is a side project for Microsoft now.
Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.
It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.
I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.
It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.
I could imagine a future where Windows is just a proprietary DE over a Linux system. I don’t think it’s coming anytime soon because of the development cost it would impose, but I don’t see why they would go to such efforts maintaining a system they could get for free if the desktop user base keeps shrinking. They’re just too greedy not to do that. Even the backwards compatibility with Windows software is becoming a solved problem.
Aside from my above rant, the PC is definitely fast becoming an enthusiast/business platform. I opened a retirement account the other day through my smart phone!
MS did a shift like that already. The shift from MS-DOS to NT was transparent to the vast majority of people to the point that most people didn’t realize they were two different OSes.
I don’t see why they couldn’t do it again. NTVDM was similar in concept to what wine does. Imagine if MS actively contributed to wine, or a wine like project.
Do you mean a Linux Subsystem for Windows (LSW)?
Well a bunch of them are using WSL to do their work, which isn’t the same, but shows how many people are just stuck with a Windows box.
In StackOverflow 2024 survey ~17% of both professional and personal use users were using WSL.
Source: StackOverflow 2024 Survey
Edit - A word went missing due to my battle with autocorrect. 😩
Microsoft could become a cloud computing platform, and the machine itself would act as a Terminal.
This often sucks when the server and terminal are onsite. Put the server elsewhere and only those with best connections will like it. Latency is a bitch.
It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses
I think at least one M365 plan includes a windows license now.
Yes, I don’t like Windows one bit anymore but back then, Windows Mobile was very solid! I loved my Lumia phones.
If Windows becomes a sub service for business only, three things three things can happen:
1 Mac’s become the most sold consumer product
2 Linux takes off like never before
3 Some consumer version where ads accompany every mouse click
I hope it’s gonna be number two
Unless there’s a miracle, it would be:
4 consumer are relegated to DRM’d-to-Hell-and-back smartphones
Been saying exactly that for years but it hasn’t happened yet… It will when the last people (like my age) want to use Windows at home, but by then Macs will have gone as well because the pc as we know it will be finished. I can see pcs as such being gone in say 10 years and it will all be mobile devices as such, and I include laptops in that. Wifey has just lost the last installed program needed for her work from home. All web/connected apps to work from now, and when they go down the whole company stops work(ing). Lost 3 whole days this year so far as the whole company couldn’t function for various reasons
i was a MS employee once. Windows hasn’t been their focus since Windows XP. Once they discovered the profit margins of Office 98… Windows was just a way to keep you using Office
This makes sense. I have a friend from way back in HS who interned there while he was working on his degree who said that cloud services was the priority at the time, and Windows was more just a vehicle that they continued to maintain. That continues to be the approximate temperature of the product and is in line with my expectations.
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they do OK but services side including AI make way more…
They pay for that AI from Open AI though. It’s not pure profit for them.
This will rely on having an executive team that can predict trends beyond the next quarter.
Doubling down on advertising, telemetry, and AI in an overly bloated OS looks really good if you only care about the profits that brings for the next 3 months, rather than how much your userbase resents it. MS is fully capable of turning this around immediately by just making LTSC available to the public without needing to buy a MAK through an enterprise channel, but that means throwing away some recurring revenue in favor of claiming a lost userbase
It’s Microsoft’s current CEO. All he is interested in is subscription revenue. Xbox hardware is next to go.
Breaking up Microsoft would be the best thing they could do right now. But it won’t happen.
And that CEO completely turned the company around. Microsoft was circling the drain before they changed strategies.
You say turned around, I say ruined. He’s just remaking it into another IBM by selling services and killing anything innovative or creative.
You’re allowed to be wrong. The fact is if they continued doing what they were doing they would be almost entirely irrelevant today.
And adding advertising to various parts of the OS.
Hey, Microsoft: de-shitify your OS if you want it to be more popular.
You would hope, but this is the same thing we see across almost all industries these days. It’s almost like there’s a root cause for it, some sort of, Iunno, economic system we could blame …
But especially cable companies, for example. Has a dwindling customer base caused them to rethink their business strategies? Or has it caused them to try and bleed that dwindling base dryer even faster?
There’s no “learning” anymore, there’s riding the bus to the absolute pits of hell and just hoping you’re not the CEO to be the one that has to go down with it.
For some reason modern business degree holders don’t even consider the possibility of increasing head coubts but instead maximising gains from remaining heads.
Same with employees, they see things like dirty stores and long lines and they try to force employees to work as sanitation crews and implement time limits to make lines faster long before they ever hire somebody new.
they already have an their AI division earns way more than the Windows division. Matters little to them about Windows numbers dropping because in reality PCs as we know it are declining far more rapidly that anyone wants to say
Everyone talking about how it’s because of Windows 11 or their greed driving people away, etc. But they’re ignoring the big one:
People don’t need as many computers these days. You don’t have a lot of households with a laptop for every member of the family because smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC for many people for media consumption and basic tasks.
I think you’re right on this. People aren’t moving away from MS because of their obnoxious behaviour. They’re moving to alternate form factors and dealing with Apple’s and Google’s obnoxious behaviour instead. People are willing to put up with a metric ton of bullshit so they don’t have to actually do anything for themselves.
I don’t think their obnoxious behavior is completely unrelated. After all, people aren’t choosing windows phones or tablets either.
That’s just because Microsoft waited until Android and iOS were well-established before trying to make a smartphone OS. It could have been the best OS ever made, and it still would have been a failure because there wasn’t a market for a third OS. It was hard enough at the time to get apps developed for both iOS and Android - there wasn’t room for a third player.
MS charged for Windows Lite, the others were free. And anyway they were building market share, but not fast enough for management, so they abandoned it mid-cycle.
Correct. Whenever you see a large chunk of the population making a change, first assume it is for mundane reasons like finances or convenience.
Not to mention google has fought to replace real PCs in grade school computer courses with chromebooks, which are glorified tablets. Recent gens simply aren’t as familiar with proper computers as phones and tablets.
And this is the absolute truth. I showed my brother today in haveibeenpawned how his main email (you guessed it, Gmail) is out there in over 150 leaks and hacks. Not 2 hours later he was buying 2 new nest thermostats to replace the ones he has at home because Google is phasing them out (yes, they still work, Google just chose to kill them).
I’m done trying to make people see the light. We’ll see what happens when it all blows up (see I didn’t say “if”).
I keep having to remind people around me that phones are the primary computing device for an ever increasing percentage of the population.
Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.
At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing “dir” into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.
Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.
Exactly. My wife hasn’t used an actual computer more than a handful of times in the last several years. She does EVERYTHING on her smartphone.
I have never owned a laptop, because my desktop unit is where I do most of my business stuff, and when I’m away from that, my smartphone is good enough.
Of course, the most important thing isn’t that we account for two less computers than a few years ago, but the smartphones that we have replaced laptops with, run Android. So that’s actually a net loss of 4 MS products.
And after all these years, Windows products still make me frustrated and infuriated. You’d think they would have honed it to a perfect product by now, but every few years they completely reconfigure the UI, and make us have to navigate a whole new, buggy system.
Yeah this happened in Japan way earlier. Japan got mobile internet much sooner than the rest of the world it was called i-mode. Which was launched in 1999. The home computer boom never happened there like it did in the West. Since everyone just uses their mobile phone to go in the internet and Japanese PCs were expensive. And doing work after hours at home wasn’t a thing since you do that at the office where your boss can see you putting in the work. The only PCs that sold reasonably well were VAIOs since those were relatively compact.
It’s also why computer literacy is very low in Japan, ask anyone who taught in Japan and they will tell you most Japanese high school students don’t know how to use a computer. Like the problems we are seeing now in the West with computer literacy among students they had for decades already.
Looks around my living room, 3 laptops, stationary, 1 nas and a server. 2 laptops are still running windows.
You are an outlier.
Same here. I was just thinking that I have way more running computers now than I did in years past. But none of mine are running Windows now.
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Hey, I have an idea that will help Microsoft:
why not add even more AI that logs everything and then reports it to the government through additional telemetry?
then they could even require the next edition to include a dedicated advertising GPU to take those logs and create tailored ads on the wallpaper as well as occasionally parse the logs and generate summaries for safety purposes!
that will bring the customers back and boost short-term profits too!
You mother fucker… You’re hired.
Yeah, that wouldn’t really do anything, google just announced it for gemini and I don’t really see a push back against it, meta wants to compromise the copy right of all creators on its platform and it too was allowed, sadly right now in the name of AI advancement every kind of privacy will be compromised
Sad thing is I guarantee they’d keep a majority market share after doing this. Few people would even be aware, and fewer still actually give a shit about their privacy. As for ads on the desktop, that might push people away… but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends’ throat after finding that they’ve had ads on YouTube for years and didn’t really care.
but then again, I had to practically force uBlock Origin down my friends’ throat after finding that they’ve had ads on YouTube for years and didn’t really care.
This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
And you wanna know the full hypocrisy? Google Chrome also comes with an Ad blocker, on by default. They block ads they don’t deem good, but allow all ads from AdSense, of course.
This is insane to me. How people can use the internet with ads is just beyond me.
My friend did have an adblock, but it was the one built into Brave (iirc) by default. I noticed they knew it was there and active, but didn’t really think twice about any of the sites it didn’t block ads on. I assume they just didn’t know it was possible to block certain ads, never really crossing their mind that some adblockers are better than others. No, if theirs can’t do it, no adblock can.
I also think years and years of unskippable commercials on cable TV, and now even streaming services, has made people kinda numb to it.
This is the terrifying part. Ads have become so normal in everyday life that people see nothing wrong with wasting their life away being marketed to by corporations. How much of someone’s life is wasted hearing their existence isn’t good enough but if they’d only buy some product they could be happy?
The Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror was supposed to be a warming.
But instead it seems corporations used it as a guide, and people just accepted having ads bombarded into their skulls in exchange for content, instead of getting enraged by it.
Perfect for when malware distributors host on Microsoft domains (Sharepoint?)… built-in ain’t blocking that enormous mess, sigh
friendship ended with npu chips now ad-processing-unit chips are my best friend.
We’re in the process of moving to Linux in our company, entirely because of how aggressively awful Windows 11 is. We’d have been perfectly happy staying on Windows 10 forever, but last week our head of development woke up to discover that Windows 10 had spontaneously chosen to “upgrade” itself during the night without him agreeing to it.
Wish you success in the migration
What distro is your company going with?
How do you manage a fleet of linux devices and stay up to date with compliance?
Not entirely sure what you mean; Linux’s user management, access control, security etc has always been ahead of Windows’ for its whole existence.
On the server side I can agree, but linux does not get device drivers for majority of hardware let alone regular device driver updates. That fact alone makes the entire company un-compliant in many industries.
You could get an entire fleet of linux supported laptops and get then compliance becomes easier to manage since the software on linux lends well to sys admin fleet control. You would have to push patches weekly to the fleet which would result in a ton of random user bugs.
Do you work for Microsoft or something? This reads exactly like their sales FUD playbook
No, im a linux user and I love linux. But it doesnt help anything to pretend it isnt flawed.
does not get device drivers for majority of hardware
Literally lying
Please go on any distro fourm to the support section and tell me how many threads have hardware related issues. Majority of these are due to non-existent/unsupported drivers.
One guy hacking together a device driver to upstream is not the same as the manufacturer supporting it with regular updates. Windows gets driver updates seemingly every week and linux is lucky to get a 2nd update or even a first.
support section
If I was reading your fan club forum I would see loads of positive comments about you.
You have no data to support your claim.
This is such a stupid argument I cant believe you’re even trying to make the case. I’ll pick a common enterprise device the HP zbook firefly. NXP NFC NPC300 Proximity Driver - Its had 5 OEM driver updates in the past 4 years on windows. Meanwhile the NXP linux_libnfc-nci repo which is NXP’s OEM repo is wildly out of date and looks borderline dead. I checked the kernel tree and there are “common” patches under drivers/nfc/nxp-nci that include support for the NPC300 but these dont match up with the patches that are released for windows and dont seem to be specific fixes to address CVE issues.
Lets go less specific and take a look at fwupd for the zbook https://fwupd.org/lvfs/hsireports/device?host_vendor=HP&host_family=103C_5336AN+HP+ZBook&host_product=HP+ZBook+Firefly+14+G7+Mobile+Workstation
Here we can see the tests that fwupd has done to verify the device firmware. As you can see its missing a lot of functionality. This is a linux supported device apparently. If its missing this much I can only imagine how bad other devices are. Keep in mind this is only checking the working functionality and is not checking to see if the patches are up to date to protect against the latest CVEs. On windows HP has released 22 patches in the last 5 years with the latest patch containing fixes for 12 CVEs. Meanwhile on linux im not sure if HP has even released a single complete patch for this device let alone constant updates to fix the CVEs.
I’m currently working on getting our device fleet in order for EU Gov contract compliance and a fleet of these devices would instantly disqualify us. I love linux but we have work to do and being ignorant to the issues doesnt help anything.
It sounds like a mixture of Chromebooks, and people simply not owning a traditional computer.
Either way, it seems to be mostly Google that’s winning here.
These 2023 stats have Chromebook sales at only ~25M units globally, so this is probably the second scenarion, people decommissioning Windows computers and using the phone and/or tablet instead. https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-tablet-market-share-Q2-2023
For most people, a tablet is a direct replacement for a laptop anyway, especially with a wireless keyboard. I run software for work that, as far as I know, is Windows only, but most people will be fine with a tablet, or even just a phone.
A tablet is not a replacement for a laptop, its just a secondary “big phone” for watching videos because its more confortable for the eyes.
And sending emails, social media, video calls, taking notes, pretty sure they can even run things like power point presentations now.
Chromebooks went from “What is that?” To literally everywhere in schools.
Android phones are everywhere.
Google and the Chrome browser really ate into Microsoft’s dominance.
And Apple, with people replacing traditional computers with Android and iOS devices.
The search function has never been the same since vista. I’m not doing a web search from the search bar. I am specifically searching for files on my computer. F-off. And now I’m constantly asked to save to some cloud I don’t give a shit about.
You sound grumpy. You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems too I bet… ha ha ha l o l
You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems
It’s crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.
Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication… A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.
I feel the same about phone numbers. Almost everything blocks VoIP numbers and only offers SMS MFA
FYI you can disable that, but yes it’s a shitty new default.
After a blissful decade on Arch Linux, stock Windows enrages me, takes hours to make it somewhat bearable.
It never worked for me, wouldn’t find a file on the directory it was searching.
This aligns with statcounter data here: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202505
Windows market share on desktop has been slowly but steadily declining. From 95+% in 2009, to almost 70% today. In the same time period Linux went up from 0.6% to 4%, which is not bad.
It can also be noted that the trend over time for the “unknown” category (which stands for 8 % today) follows the same trend as Linux. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Linux is over-represented in the “unknown” category, and may actually be closer to 5-7 %.
Apparently Linux have 20% market share in Norway. That is… I don’t really believe it, but really cool if true.
So this is just an apple victory or is Android to blame?
Kids mostly use mobile devices and don’t even know what a folder is, so both.
And that’s honestly why this story isn’t the good news it appears to be. An entire generation growing up used to (or rather, used by) locked-down devices designed for consumption is a goddamned disaster!
But if you say something like People should have basic IT knowledge you get called an elitist.
And yet people are fine with:
People should have basic cooking knowledge
People should have basic financial knowledge
Can’t use a computer when you’re tired and wanna lay in bed, or just browse memes on transit to work, or have a GPS in your pocket, or a camera in your pocket, or a portable communication device… etc
Strap a minisfourm pc and battery pack to your back, run a usb cable up to your AR glasses. Strap a Svalboard to each hand and run the cables up your arms. Easy problem solved.
Yea, people don’t even have computers now. Its happy tap the phone and love the Google, return to monke. We are the .00000001 percent.
Android is not on this plot, it’s desktop only.
The 2nd place is interestingly not Apple, but Unknown.
Three point four percentage points. Not great. Not terrible.
It was unthinkable 10 years ago. I call it a win.
It sounds much better when you say 1 in 167 people then vs 1 in 25 people today.
Apple Silicon goes absolutely BRRRR
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They would have way higher ratio of supporters if they stayed at XP or 7, and just keep security patching it but no, they deliberately sabotaged their star product with Vista, 8, 10, and 11. They deserved it.
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They don’t care they have Azure now.
My new laptop came with Windows 11, but that’s gone now. Steamdeck must be helping with these figures too. Good work everyone.
M series chips on macbooks are likely helping more.
The article says Mac sales are declining too.
Apparently most of the decline is people that are simply ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore.People ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore doesn’t explain that the relative share of Mac and Linux has increased for the past 15 years though. Unless for some reason Windows users are more likely to ditch their PC because they don’t need it than Mac or Linux users.
I think thats exactly it. A lot of the people begrudgingly have a PC. I bet most of those just use whatever the PC came with. Linux and Mac users are more likely to enjoy using a PC.
Linux users NEED their computer. You don’t put up with getting into Linux for fun except of you are a very special breed of geek.
Average people are also more likely to ditch their PCs than Linux users.
See the recent meme:
I just installed Mint and some games on 5 Thinkpad T420s my boss was going to throw out. Sunday’s LAN party was pretty fun.
Is this my future?
If you’re lucky
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202505
Both Linux and MacOS look fairly flat overall, with a few spikes for Mac. What did happen was iOS and especially Android went to the moon.
Most people had a PC for a bit of light office work, emails and storing pictures. All of that can be done on a phone and more besides. It’s not great that a handful of Silicon Valley techbros are holding everyone’s data to ransom, but that’s what the masses are doing.
I could quite literally just get by on my phone these days. I only use the laptop for the larger screen and something to hold an extremely large capacity SD card, as for whatever reason samsung flip phones don’t have that anymore.
MAC sales peaked 10-11 years ago.
I just got a cheap minipc to tinker with and it had windows 11. Not bad and unexpected.
First thing I did was wipe and install Ubuntu of course because that’s what I wanted.
I do like Mini PCs, but I kind of wish there was an easy way to get a solid GPU into it. There’s those weird docks but they’re far from standard, and it would be nice if the GPU had a similar form factor, so you could just stack them up like a MiniPC on top of it like an old hi-fi separates system.
Slap a storage box on it as well for some HDDs, baby you got a server going.
Your best bet is to shoot for one with an AMD Ryzen chip, as they have by-far the best iGPU available.
Getting a dedicated GPU into a mini PC is a pretty big ask, but the above will even do moderate gaming tasks. My laptop with a Ryzen iGPU plays Guild Wars 2 just fine, for example.
A self-built Mini-ITX box might also be up your alley, as those can take proper PCI-E graphics cards.
Forcing people to buy a new computer for nothing more than a security chip on the motherboard will do that
They also had pretty strict CPU requirements. Mostly only 8th gen and newer, or a ryzen, would be required.
Just want to say, Google Docs is NOT free. Just because you don’t send them money doesn’t mean you aren’t paying.
What is free though is LibreOffice, or some Nextcloud document addons (to a degree) if ”cloud” is the thing.
It’s Linux for me but I also have to assume tablet culture plays a role too.
I think it’s more to do with phones - people are just more likely to do most tasks on a phone rather than a laptop.
Absolutely! I observe this behaviour on myself: I am nowadays even sometimes coding on my phone (though, the experience is still… “suboptimal”), but for everything else? Its mostly fine.
There is no way it’s “mostly fine”.
Small screen for consumption, large screen for creation, - only way it’s fine if you don’t create anything and just consume, which is I guess what most people do.At best I’ll use Termux as I am not in the mood to boot my pc and I juat need to edit some config file.
Are people really actively using tablets? I thought that was more of a hype and is now something that lies around and gets occasional use on the couch, but not really productive.
I’ve been using tablets since the first generation (Galaxy tab), and I must say that it kind of veered to that side after a while, since getting a convertible laptop. A few years back I got a Huawei tablet with a pen and keyboard, that had impressive battery, and it took the place of my convertible. While I’m a Linux-Android-occassional Windows guy, I now use an ipad (As much as I hate to admit, in the tablet space they are vastly superior), with keyboard and pen, for most of my away needs, and for general around the house stuff. I do a lot of graphic design and photo stuff, and thanks to Affinity’s suite, I can actually do real work on the thing.
As a student, yeah, I see lots of people using tablets for their work instead of laptops.
please tell me they have those little external keyboards which would make them basically a shitty laptop
Some do, but a lot also use it with a touch pen for notes.
Honestly tablets are perfectly sufficient for most education related things, plus they’re thin, light weight, and don’t need to be plugged in constantly unlike the goobers who bring gaming laptops.
I would’ve sprung for an iPad and done the same (though used a BT mechanical keyboard instead a chicklet one) if I wasn’t in a CS degree that requires me to have a real OS that can run compilers, interpreters, multiple browsers, and uses a real folder structure.
oh thank goodness. An image of students typing their notes with the on screen keyboard flashed in my mind and i was scared
Your average computer user is mainly using it for interacting with various web based services and playing media. Don’t need good input methods for that so tablets are a cheaper and easier to maintain alternative to a laptop.
Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It’s broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it’s familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.
I bought a tablet and I feel like the money has been wasted. I use it maybe once a month.
Tablets are kind of in the middle of nowhere in terms of functionality at the moment, bigger and less practical than a phone, while being less capable than laptops. Its a shame, because on paper they look pretty great and they are insanely powerful nowadays
I just barely used my first one for the longest time, since I mostly played games or programmed on computers. Then I started to use it to read books and watch Netflix. I am on my 3rd one now and probably spend 60% of my computer time on it.
Me and my Steam Deck
Mostly used it in 2023 or so when I was sick on the couch. And yeah some hours on the trip I’m currently on. But it would just have been fine without.
Sometimes I see people post pictures use it in the most scenic locations, similar to the promotional video. And all I can think of is that if you want to play game so badly, you can just stay home. Much easier and also probably safer for the deck.
To each their own. Just hard to understand for me
According to StatCounter tablets never breached 7% market share, and even that was in 2014. Nowadays they are below 2%. Windows’s lost userbase seems to be mostly about people using their phones for everything.
It’s almost like if you piss off your users then they’ll ditch you.
Mobile and I imagine Google Docs really did a number on Windows necessity. In my experience, large companies and government rely on Windows and O365, smaller organizations use Google Docs. Even universities I’ve seen start with classrooms a decade ago using Google Docs and hangouts to eventually using Google Suite or whatever its called these days for student/faculty email
At least word documents saved as PDF and shared is way more common today than a decade ago. A decade ago I mainly remember seeing nothing but Excel and SPSS in classes, now I see professors showing how to do stuff in Google Sheets. For a long time computer science and math professors have been geeky and idealistic so you’d regularly see Libre/OpenOffice used in lectures
Another is Blender. In like 2008 ~2.49 Blender, professionals would scoff. A decade later Blender 2.8 releases and by today I hear way less vitriol and more opensess as another tool in the toolbox or recognition as great for at least learning or professional use for smaller teams. Flow was a successful movie made with it
Davinci Resolve is getting better and a lot more mainstream today than a decade ago. And stuff like Kdenlive is more powerful than the vast majority of people need. People were doing great stuff a decade+ ago with iMovie and basic Windows Movie Maker
Video games are a lot easier now because of Valve with Linux
Mobile, adults used to have laptop that pretty much excited to login to their credit cards and pay them, use TurboxTax, print out MapQuest directions, etc. Phones have made a laptop redundant I think for most people now. Work provides one if needed. TV for movies and phone for everything else
To me there’s nothing Microsoft can do to stem the decline of Windows. Mobile first is standard now. Microsoft has no presence in smart TVs because they failed with Windows Mobile and Xbox hardware is on life support and they never made the stripped down Xbox Windows available for TV makers anyways. The loss towards mobile will continue.
Then there’s national security concerns for countries around the world to be reliant on American software and hardware. Diversification of operating system has picked up heavily. It started like 20 years ago but it didn’t seem to really pick up until the Huawei sanctions and driving Huawei to their own OS and Chinese government to invest even more into domestic Linux distro a. Then the recent American trade wars renewing interest in European countries in Linux and LibreOffice. My understanding has been that Linux had had strong adoption in India for some time now
Desktop Linux in the US, I say just keep focusing on prosumer/professional users. Software developers and other IT professionals are already Linux heavy. Some commercial software is available like Maya and Davinci Resolve. Krita and Blender are great. Kdenlive is good. Seems like GIMP and Inkscape development may be picking up momentum. Darktable is great. Valve keep focusing on SteamOS and community distros keep supporting more handhelds making every year easier and easier for gaming. Steam Deck 2 is hopefully a way more available in retail than the first deck. First product work out the kinks and prove viability. Second product and possibly AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc are way more interested in low power gaming than before as well as first class Linux support
Outside of the US, I feel like Trump both term one and now term two has really given Linux and open source software a global boost in appeal.
I agree with all your points bar one.
5000 employees, 10b valuation. We use Google docs. We’re not “China Telecom” big, but I doubt anyone would call us small. I think most young companies are happy on google docs.
5000 employees, 10b valuation. We use Google docs. We’re not “China Telecom” big, but I doubt anyone would call us small. I think most young companies are happy on google docs.
And on the flip-side my dozen-employee workplace runs on Microsoft Outlook/OneDrive/Teams 🙃
If your founder used Microsoft, that might be why they just chose to go with what they knew.
Yea, the organisation was also founded in the 90s, so Microsoft was the default for everything.
Technically, MSFT can create Windows versions for TVs, smartphones, and smartwatches. Because they’ve made Windows development more modular, they’re not developing it because it won’t generate significant profits or revenue.
That’s until OpenAI announces an AI-powered device, and if it ends up being a mainstream consumer success, we’ll see many companies creating something similar, adding to the integration of it into their ecosystems.
