Well, it seems barring a miracle, the Microsoft we're both anticipating is a smaller/less important company in 2020 than it was in 2000 or 2010, and mostly we're arguing about the degree of diminution. And that's a self-inflicted wound.
(p.s. are we allowed to have a reasoned discussion on Slashdot? Shouldn't we be flaming each other at this point?
Fair enough. Here's some data on Microsoft's income by business line: http://betanews.com/2012/10/18/microsoft-q1-2013-by-the-numbers-16-1b-revenue-53-cents-eps/ As a SWAG, consumer PC sales is about a quarter of Microsoft's profit, with the two parts of business sales constituting the other 3/4. So you have a solid argument.
However, the BYOD movement and further losses on desktops will put price and technology pressure on Microsoft. Most of those tools are part-and-parcel of the Microsoft monoculture. They don't work very well with other vendor's products. The growth of cloud services that are workstation/end user device neutral pose a substantial risk to the company.
If Win 8 is a success, consumers and businesses will continue Microsoft dominance. If it's a failure, at best it's a major crack in the foundation.
Did you see the word "consumers" in my comment?
Enterprises have different economies. Now don't get me started on CIO decision-making and the blind faith investment in Microsoft infrastructure, but I was specifically talking about individuals who make decisions on behalf of themselves.
Mod parent up insightful (I contributed to this thread so I can't use my moderator points.) The Microsoft hardware vendor lock-in is a very interesting ramification that I had not thought about.
If this article is right and Windows 8 ends up confusing and thereby pissing off consumers, I think this will be a huge win for Apple and Android. When you plopped $1k-$2k for a computer (in the olden days
And the associated risks for Microsoft, let's call it the "horns effect*," could be catastrophic. People will say, "I gave Microsoft a chance for this new item, they suck. I'm not throwing more money at them. Look at how much I've spent on Windows computers/applications over the last 10+ years! Fool me twice, shame on me!" This really is a 'bet-the-company' move by Ballmer & Co (and of course we have 12 years of history of Microsoft under Ballmer to project from...)
* opposite of the "halo effect"
Mod parent up insightful. This is a real concern and has both benefits and risks. Look at how Google is doing with Motorola, they've bought both the patents and the associated lawsuits.
This be an appropriate story for Talk Like a Pirate Day, matey! http://www.talklikeapirate.com/
I've done -a lot of software development- on a 24x80 screen running EMACS, including code and documentation. Early on, I used my first Mac to do graphics to merge into documents done with the Scribe markup langauge. Multiple monitors are nice, they can make one more productive, but a lot of time what I've seen in visual development environments is glitz that distracts from the task at hand.
So I'm not saying you're wrong, but at the same time a lot of people did a lot of good work without multiple bitmapped monitors.
And I've worked on some very large development efforts, where we had compile-engines working in the background; that's a mode I'm not sure you've recognized as legitimate.
And who could forget RIMM? Well, any more, I guess it's easy to forget RIMM.
(I was offered a Blackberry in late 2002. I turned it down, saying "if I'm doing email, I want a full-sized keyboard." I've never regretted that decision.)
Anyone got data on failure rates on HP, Dell and Lenovo laptops? Anecdotally, it's my observation that Lenovo laptops are a lot sturdier than either HP or Dell laptops. Purchase price is not quite the same as TCO, and the "utility cost" of having your laptop shit-the-bed on the road is rarely accounted for in the CIO's cost models.
On the other hand, as soon as you do need to do anything creative, or do any real computation, or scale up to multiple users, or support non-trivial interactions, the current crop of mobile devices suck. All those downsides that didn't matter before are now dominant, and the high price, low power and almost zero flexibility are fatal liabilities. And no matter how much window dressing you lay out, they always will be, because it's not the job these devices were designed for.
I don't buy this in a lot of cases. How much 'computational power' (or storage) does it take to write a book (even "War and Peace"
There certainly are creative endeavors (e.g. signal processing, including still image, video or sound editing, or computational biology/ecology/climatology, or data mining in social sciences) that do require a fair amount of computation, but a lot of that computation can be done with special purpose hardware (e.g. GPUs.) Those might require general purpose desktops, or special purpose desktops, or mobile devices with specialized hardware, or a combination of mobile device plus cloud services.
In part, this is what the Apple/Samsung lawsuit is about. If you follow the "Innovator's Dilemma" arguments, the PC makers, and now a lot of the Android makers (tablets and phones) are competing solely on price, because the innovation to get any other advantage has already occurred.
Certainly Apple has invested a lot in product development for iPhone, iPad, iOS, etc. Whether these things should be patentable in the first place, should be separated from whether enforcing the patents, "trade dress", etc results in more or less innovation.
The question for HP in particular, is whether they can innovate on top of (a) Microsoft licensed technologies, (b) Android licensed technologies, or (c) invest time and energies in doing something original. (c) is definitely a gamble, but it's not clear that HP can ever grow out of the bottom by following either (a) or (b).
We stayed up and watched this, initially to see Benedict Cumberbatch: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/lastenemy/synopsis.html
All we need now is an unexplained outbreak of an unknown disease in some conflict-ridden part of the world. (Maybe the recent Ebola outbreak in Uganda? http://allafrica.com/stories/201208120306.html )
The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.
