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Comment by iaw | Hacker News Reader

When Bill Gates was at the helm he skated a fine line of legalities in order to build a sustained monopoly. The ecosystem continued to evolve as his priorities shifted away from Microsoft and none of his replacements were able to adapt as dynamically as Bill did.

Ballmer is the pinnacle example of this arrogance without evidence attitude. It's like the ghost of corporate Bill Gates will guide and give luck no matter how stupid the decision they make.

It's sad because Microsoft could've evolved gracefully into a behemoth larger than Apple and Google, if only there had been an ounce of humility after Bill Gates left.

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> It's sad because Microsoft could've evolved gracefully into a behemoth larger than Apple and Google

Why is it sad? It's enough that MS monopoly still plagues the desktop. I'd say it's good they didn't manage to bring the same sickening monopolistic lock-in to mobile. That said, current big participants have lot's of their own problems.

You mean like the sickening lock-in that we get with Apple?

Yep. Android is also becoming "another Windows" in a sense. For instance, good luck finding drivers with blobs for anything except Bionic, if open drivers aren't available.

I don't run Linux as my main desktop OS for the same reason - drivers.

It seems like you lose either way.

I don't feel locked in at all with Windows though. Never have. With Apple, I feel locked into their hardware. With Microsoft? What am I locked into exactly?

I'm using Linux as my desktop system (including for gaming) and drivers situation feels OK. Unless you use some really weird hardware, Linux drivers aren't usually a problem. Especially with Intel being pretty open and AMD opening things up (GPU wise), it's getting even better.

It's sad that ms stumbled and we have competition in computing again? Did I read that right?

There is a parallel universe where Windows 8 was the beginning of Windows as a flavor of Linux and the attempt to create a new ecosystem with Windows 10 never manifested as Microsoft became a new creature.

It's sad that a company with numerous intelligent and talented people fails repeatedly. It's a waste of their efforts.

As it stands Microsoft has basically become a staple commodity. Like proctor & gamble peddling soap products Microsoft peddles products for small/medium corporations. Xbox is the only thing keeping a foothold in the consumer space anymore. But they continue to make predictable money at it.

Microsoft Windows is still the most-installed OS by far in the consumer desktop and laptop space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Despite the way it seems living in San Francisco, Apple's market share on desktop is under 10% (via browsing statistics). And Linux and Chrome OS have nearly an order of magnitude less market share.

Windows is still, for all intents and purposes, completely dominant.

Regarding ChromeOS I never saw them here in Europe besides occasionall units at big surface stores. And they usually stay there for weeks before they vanish. It is quite easy to check if it is the same one, if they don't lock it.

I never saw any trace of the success they appear to have in US.

Yeah and half of all humans on the planet will own a smart phone within the next 5 years. That's an order of magnitude more than will ever own a desktop/laptop. 1/3 or so will be iOS devices, around 1.5 billion and will represent 90% of all profit available. iOS commands a huge lead in enterprise sales, 75-80% in the US market.

Apple skated to where the puck was going, not where it already was. Microsoft was too busy servicing the cash cow (and fomenting internal politics) to allow any disruptions. They had already lost the next great battle the day the iPhone was released.

Google's Android only survived because they pulled the mother of all pivots the day of the iPhone announcement and immediately poured all their efforts into copying iOS. (Remember: Android started life as a Blackberry clone!) None of this is controversial - the original Android team members have confirmed it in multiple interviews over the years.

What Microsoft is doing now is extremely smart. They know they lost the mobile war and are moving on to the next battlefield: Cloud services. They're milking Windows on the desktop as they make the transition but it's just a smoke screen to buy time. Open sourcing technology, supporting Linux, etc are all moves designed to get them customers for Azure. They'll now happily sell you SQL Server for Linux licenses, or a subscription for Office on iPad.

Yes, but with the convergence of laptops/tablets with Surface like devices, but actually have a win there.

Using iOS or Android on a tablet + keyboard isn't really the same experience as being able to use all the usual Windows applications if I want to, specially Visual Studio on the go.

However they are just pivoting like IBM did when they lost the PC market.

Well, if we're talking about the long game, let's continue following that puck :)

As smartphones become more and more popular, they reach further and further down towards groups of people who can't afford iOS devices (unless you're counting second hand devices). I don't really see Apple's % of the market ever going up.

As the market matures and the hardware reaches "good enough" levels, the overwhelming majority of smartphones used will be the equivalent of the "beige boxes" of old (from the PC world). On top of that, the app competition is becoming so cutthroat that app prices will probably continue to go down (per app).

So, long story short: Apple will probably never enjoy a bigger share of the smartphone market than it did in the past and most of the competition will be around hardware and software with razor thin margins.

Meanwhile, more and more people from developing countries will start working in companies which use overwhelmingly... Windows desktops and associated software.

They will also use and pay for various services, some of which, as you noted, will be hosted on... Azure.

Microsoft's main cash cows will never dry up. Companies want/are willing/are able to pay for software.

I think that the longer term threat for Microsoft is Amazon, not Apple.

If you're working on any cloud software backend, windows is probably your third choice for development environment, and I see it really unlikely to change.

I see office software being commoditized instead. Then even the business guys can move off windows. If only google had some motivation improving docs. Maybe that hits another cultural wall. An engineering driven company can't produce tools for creating beautiful content.

Loaded content: how much software have you seen commoditized? Especially end-user facing, professional and very complex content production software.

As an example, at least for graph production, Excel seems to be the common software. It's pretty hard to get decent looking stuff compared to some old fashioned software that were used to create graphs earlier before that.

There used to be specialists doing the graphs for various printed materials. Now it's all made by the marketers, consultants or number crunchers themselves. Of course the quality has been so bad ever since that happened, but nobody seems to care. Even designers don't really understand much about graphs.

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