Hacker News Reader

Comment by whynotmaybe | Hacker News Reader

The "niche" market is corporate and gouv.

These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design)

No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon from those.

The android market share is mainly mobile devices and Microsoft gave that market up a few years ago, focusing on azure and office. Here again, focusing the corporate/gouv world.

The corporate/gouv world has many windows only app and processes that would cost a fortune to replace.

Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.

View on HN

"These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design)"

I'm not convinced. About ten years ago one could say exactly the same thing about Macs companies located outside of California. I only had my first work Mac in 2012, when I convinced my boss to let inherit one from a graphic designer. Since then, I've worked in two extremely traditional corporates that gave me the choice to use macOS. And plenty of executives were/are using macOS too.

In the meantime things got actually easier than 10 years ago: web apps became prevalent and even Microsoft joined the party.

> Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.

but if it continues to shrink (and it almost certainly will), then Intel (and AMD) are in big trouble

Intel can't exist servicing a niche

IBM isn't trying to float a multibillion market cap solely on the back of their mainframe CPUs...

and of course let's not forget that Microsoft is also continuing to hint at future Windows-on-ARM...the first try failed but I have heard more talk...

(Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.)

I generally agree with your point though but I am seeing that as more and more of office work moves to living within a web browser, it is becoming more hardware agnostic.

> (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.)

No. It's reality. Mainframes are here to stay. IBM continues to develop and sell plenty of mainframes. Several other manufacturers do as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z16

Where I work has applications dating back decades with complex data analysis algorithms developed by very smart people. Strict backwards-compatibility is critical. We have mainframes.

There are many other reasons to run mainframes. For example, mainframes offer pretty incredible features with regards to redundancy, and making everything hot-swappable in case of failure without interrupting workloads. That's especially useful in places like the financial industry. There, a single failure or error can cost much more than a mainframe.

They're a niche, but a big enough one to support a multi-billion dollar business. It shrunk for many years, but it's currently even growing.

I was doing work on an IBM AS/400 mainframe in my previous job, just over a decade ago. It supported Java and Tomcat (which was fairly current at the time) out of the box. The only oddity I needed to deal with was making sure I had a proper JDBC driver for its DB/2 database.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't have to deal with it anymore, but mainframes are definitely still around.

Mainframes don't get that much recognition outside of the niche they occupy, but they really aren't going anywhere.

No, I was referring to mainframes.

Back in the day, they cost a fortune to set up and replacing them is a high risk - low value for many CEO's.

In Québec, the SAAQ (provincial DIV) decided to get rid of the mainframe by replacing it with SAP and with the amount of data they had, the migration took them a month of downtime.

Then they completely mismanaged the startup of the new system and a lot of people complained. The CEO was fired. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/head-of-saaq-loses-his-job-eric-...

I'm sure that Windows Server will gradually be replaced by containerized app running in some cloud but windows desktop will take a long time to be replaced, especially because of office.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com