3 ms·

Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that peo

Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that people want to pay for and need to find a way to generate recurring revenue through subscription services. Witness the rise of Windows 10. How can they make money if you permanently own your software? What if Moore's law stops and we're sitting here 10 years later with computers that are only a little faster on single core performance?

cm2187 11y ago
> How can they make money if you permanently own your software? Your hardware will die or become obsolete quickly enough that you still have to buy a new machine and with that a new windows license. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the churn for smartphones and tablets was a multiple of desktop pcs. Cars are a mature industry. You still have to replace your car regularly, but the new car doesn't go faster. But I have the feeling Microsoft is even loosing their market share on laptops, everyone around me replaced their windows laptop with a mac. And despite being myself heavily invested in the windows ecosystem, I am very uncomfortable with their new OS and considering alternatives.
- taneq 11y ago
  This is true. Their problem is that until recently they've existed in a growth market and their annual profits rely on new PC sales. Shareholders don't see "we're a $10 billion company but we'll be transitioning to a $2 billion company over the next 10 years" as an acceptable strategy so they're forced to try and wring growth-market profits out of a mature market.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- userbinator 11y ago
  Your hardware will die or become obsolete quickly enough that you still have to buy a new machine and with that a new windows license. In other words, planned obolescence. Often more euphemistically known as "lifecycle engineering/management". Solid-state electronics can function indefinitely if they're designed well and not abused, but the companies obviously don't like that so they're deliberately trying to shorten it, often saving some cost too. I have 20+ years old hardware that still works just fine, and I wouldn't be surprised if it continues functioning 20 years from now.
_Understated_ 11y ago
I think we will be. It has stopped. I just upgraded my "old" Dell Precision T5500 to a X99 hand-built machine with an NVMe SSD and so on and I was rather underwhelmed: It's not as fast as a 5 year jump in architecture would have been 10 years ago (if that makes sense!), not even close. I think Moore's law is done already. Intel have slowed their speed improvements over the last several years and are getting rid of their tick-tock. I think it's market maturity: Things are "fast enough" (yes there are always those that push the limits, like gamers) but I reckon there are more mums and dads that just want stuff to work and will hang onto it for years than those that demand the fastest every year. In fact, something I see in forums now is that even gamers are hanging onto their "old" 2600k chips since they are still incredibly fast. My feelings on the OS are that the OS is something I shouldn't have to deal with much... it's merely a vessel to launch my applications (Visual Studio and SQL Server mainly) so I don't need anything else as long as I can run my applications and it's secure enough (I am still on Win 8.1 with Start8). I am willing to go out on a limb and say that many others will be the same and from personal experience, just in my own circle, they are: Me: Upgraded my 2010 Precision to a new machine last month Wife: Upgraded her 6 year old MAC at Christmas Dad: Upgraded his 8 year old Win XP machine last year for a £300 Dell Brother: Still rocking a first gen Macbook Pro
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Moore's law is still alive on GPUs, which are developing at ludicrous speed. Of course most Office applications don't need a GPU, and all the bloat in modern operating systems doesn't help create an impression of speed on the desktop. More the opposite - if you're saving to the cloud, it's always going to feel much slower and clunkier than saving to a local disk. But creative and scientific applications - including AI - always need all the cycles available and then some. There are apps that could sink a 1000X CPU speed bump without blinking. They'll become more practical as they move to GPUs, but there's a significant extra cost in coding for not-really-standard GPU families than for a generic mostly-standard CPU range.
puranjay 11y ago
I literally write for a living. I used to swear by Word for YEARS. But now I haven't touched it in years. I've switched over completely to Google Docs. Sure, Word has more features, but none that I really miss.
aroberge 11y ago
Many universities are adopting Office 365 which comes with a free licence for faculty, staff, and students: they can install it on up to 5 different devices and have 1TB of space on OneDrive. The catch: after students graduate, they lose their free OneDrive and must start paying if they want to use upgraded versions of Office 365. By that point, many will have become "addicted" to the software and will gladly pay to continue to use it.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  Idk I was a huge supporter of ms productivity software up until when they tried to convert me from a customer to a cow and managed to move the hell away from one drive quite fast. Shame because the integration was so much better than dropbox (i.e. Files aren't downloaded until accessed and you can control how) and because their office suite is really miles better than competitors.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

cm2187 11y ago

> How can they make money if you permanently own your software? Your hardware will die or become obsolete quickly enough that you still have to buy a new machine and with that a new windows license. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the churn for smartphones and tablets was a multiple of desktop pcs. Cars are a mature industry. You still have to replace your car regularly, but the new car doesn't go faster. But I have the feeling Microsoft is even loosing their market share on laptops, everyone around me replaced their windows laptop with a mac. And despite being myself heavily invested in the windows ecosystem, I am very uncomfortable with their new OS and considering alternatives.

taneq 11y ago
This is true. Their problem is that until recently they've existed in a growth market and their annual profits rely on new PC sales. Shareholders don't see "we're a $10 billion company but we'll be transitioning to a $2 billion company over the next 10 years" as an acceptable strategy so they're forced to try and wring growth-market profits out of a mature market.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
userbinator 11y ago
Your hardware will die or become obsolete quickly enough that you still have to buy a new machine and with that a new windows license. In other words, planned obolescence. Often more euphemistically known as "lifecycle engineering/management". Solid-state electronics can function indefinitely if they're designed well and not abused, but the companies obviously don't like that so they're deliberately trying to shorten it, often saving some cost too. I have 20+ years old hardware that still works just fine, and I wouldn't be surprised if it continues functioning 20 years from now.

_Understated_ 11y ago

I think we will be. It has stopped. I just upgraded my "old" Dell Precision T5500 to a X99 hand-built machine with an NVMe SSD and so on and I was rather underwhelmed: It's not as fast as a 5 year jump in architecture would have been 10 years ago (if that makes sense!), not even close. I think Moore's law is done already. Intel have slowed their speed improvements over the last several years and are getting rid of their tick-tock. I think it's market maturity: Things are "fast enough" (yes there are always those that push the limits, like gamers) but I reckon there are more mums and dads that just want stuff to work and will hang onto it for years than those that demand the fastest every year. In fact, something I see in forums now is that even gamers are hanging onto their "old" 2600k chips since they are still incredibly fast. My feelings on the OS are that the OS is something I shouldn't have to deal with much... it's merely a vessel to launch my applications (Visual Studio and SQL Server mainly) so I don't need anything else as long as I can run my applications and it's secure enough (I am still on Win 8.1 with Start8). I am willing to go out on a limb and say that many others will be the same and from personal experience, just in my own circle, they are: Me: Upgraded my 2010 Precision to a new machine last month Wife: Upgraded her 6 year old MAC at Christmas Dad: Upgraded his 8 year old Win XP machine last year for a £300 Dell Brother: Still rocking a first gen Macbook Pro

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
Moore's law is still alive on GPUs, which are developing at ludicrous speed. Of course most Office applications don't need a GPU, and all the bloat in modern operating systems doesn't help create an impression of speed on the desktop. More the opposite - if you're saving to the cloud, it's always going to feel much slower and clunkier than saving to a local disk. But creative and scientific applications - including AI - always need all the cycles available and then some. There are apps that could sink a 1000X CPU speed bump without blinking. They'll become more practical as they move to GPUs, but there's a significant extra cost in coding for not-really-standard GPU families than for a generic mostly-standard CPU range.

puranjay 11y ago

I literally write for a living. I used to swear by Word for YEARS. But now I haven't touched it in years. I've switched over completely to Google Docs. Sure, Word has more features, but none that I really miss.

aroberge 11y ago

Many universities are adopting Office 365 which comes with a free licence for faculty, staff, and students: they can install it on up to 5 different devices and have 1TB of space on OneDrive. The catch: after students graduate, they lose their free OneDrive and must start paying if they want to use upgraded versions of Office 365. By that point, many will have become "addicted" to the software and will gladly pay to continue to use it.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
Idk I was a huge supporter of ms productivity software up until when they tried to convert me from a customer to a cow and managed to move the hell away from one drive quite fast. Shame because the integration was so much better than dropbox (i.e. Files aren't downloaded until accessed and you can control how) and because their office suite is really miles better than competitors.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]