6 ms·

This isn't surprising, really. Windows Phone has been poorly for a long time. While I understand Microsoft's efforts at trying to approach the mobile space, it

by Zhyl 9y ago

This isn't surprising, really. Windows Phone has been poorly for a long time. While I understand Microsoft's efforts at trying to approach the mobile space, it does seem that it's often at the expense of their core product - very similar to how Google nearly crippled their core offering by integrating everything with Google+. I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks.

richardwhiuk 9y ago
Windows is extremely well sunk into the enterprise market, and neither Linux nor Mac are at all focusing sufficiently on it to displace them. Linux isn't user friendly enough, and Mac's support policy is a complete no go for enterprise.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  Every enterprise I have worked at had both linux and mac available to developers. Is this not your experience? You seem to present as truth the opposite of what I have lived.
  - blackoil 9y ago
    Developers make a very small percentage of overall enterprise market.
  - jeff_petersen 9y ago
    In my (bigcorp) experience, its all windows all the way with macs available only to developers who have a need (iOS dev usually). And don’t forget that developers are a tiny minority of employees.
    - megaman22 9y ago
      As seemingly ubiquitous as Macbooks are, their market share has never really budged. It's been 3-5% for the entirety of the OS X era.
      - jorvi 9y ago
        That's because there has never been a <$999 MacBook. If you purely start to look at the Ultrabook segment then MacBooks have an absolutely staggering market share.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        I seldom see any Macs around in most southern European countries, but I do see ultrabook PCs running Windows like the Asus ones.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I never worked on an enterprise with GNU/Linux worstations on their IT policy, on some companies IT tolerated rebel developers provided they took care 100% of integration issues with the company network and official tools. Macs are usually only available to upper management, unless required for iOS development, in which case they are part of a pool shared among project teams.
  - dagw 9y ago
    Is this not your experience? Not at all. Linux can sometimes be made available on servers if necessary, but if you want Linux on your desktop you have to use a VM (ideally without telling IT). Never worked at a large place where Macs where readily available. Macs used to be more popular ~10 years ago or so with the marketing and communications people doing a lot of DTP and design work, but even that seems to have greatly decreased.
    - jmkni 9y ago
      In my experience, it’s depressingly common for companies to have one single Mac that they dust off once a year to test something in Safari.
  - MagnumOpus 9y ago
    "Developers" are a miniscule share of "enterprise". We are talking about the billion computers on corporate office workers' desks, not about the maybe-a-million computers of web/network/systems developers. Counter-anecdote: every place I worked at including 4-5 major companies in various industries had compulsory windows desktops for everyone. The few of us that also had a Linux (or AIX/HP-UX/...) machines that we did our work on, SSHd into those machines.
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    What OS were the other 98% (i.e. non-devs) of employees using?
    - herbst 9y ago
      Usually Mac in my experience because nobody on their right mind would bother with Windows in a working environment.
      - chrisper 9y ago
        Except people who do .NET development, no? I wish I could use Linux, but I can't since I am working on WPF stuff.
      - EpicEng 9y ago
        Then I guess the vast majority of people are insane because Mac use in Enterprise is essentially non-existent.
        herbst 9y ago
        To be fair in my limited experience it is true. I live and work and Switzerland, the majority of customers i faced with, i.e. medium to bigger companies, universities and gov agencies all used Macs. I travelled as Digitalnomad, and went to plenty meetups around Startups, Entrepreneurship and other not 100% tech things. Clear mac dominance as well. However i work with Rails, Python and fancy things. I know if i would look into .NET/suit wearing side of things, things would look very different.
- herbst 9y ago
  If a Ubuntu in 2017 isn't user friendly I really don't know what that phrase is even supposed to mean.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I lost access to my netbook $HOME, when Ubuntu just refused to acknowledge the existence the file system after freezing in X. It required a boot direct into the GRUB root console and running fsck from there. Not something that regular macOS and Windows users expect as user friendly.
    - hollander 9y ago
      I've helped people who lost access to their Windows 7 home directory. It didn't mean they ended up in commandline mode, but it meant their home folder was recreated from scratch. Many things didn't work anymore. I bet 99% of Windows users can't solve that by themselves. I don't see any difference with your problem. The problem you describe is bad as you can't use the computer at all, while my problem created a false illusion that the home folder was OK as it was still there. That the old one was renamed, made invisible, and then the new one got the old name - didn't help at all.
  - isolli 9y ago
    Just one example: every few weeks I need to manually remove old images as described here [0], otherwise security updates won't be installed. Four versions and four years later, it's still not fixed. [0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-space-when-upgrading https://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-...
  - OoooooooO 9y ago
    Ubuntu did not enable the energy saving options by default on my notebook and did not install the wifi drivers out of the box. Which was a "bit" painful because the office is wifi only and getting online then is impossible. Had to hunt down the driver, put it on a stick and install them. Never again. And the laptop was 5+ years old ...
  - 9y ago
yoz-y 9y ago
They have a lot going for them in the desktop market still. Apple targets only the high end market (at least in terms of prices), Chromebooks come with a set of constraints that many can not overcome.
keypress 9y ago
Partner has a Chromebook, and it's really rough around the edges. 'Simple' things like file management/association is a pain. And it's been pretty buggy. Vanilla OS with no 3rd party plugins. If the OS is neglected and not matured it could easily go the same way.
coldtea 9y ago
>I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks. It's simple: Chromebooks are crippled by the mostly-web concept and Macbooks only cater to (a part of) the more affluent end of the market.
- mark-r 9y ago
  I worked in IT support for a while, and saw that many business apps are expected to come with a browser interface now. If companies could be weaned from their dependence on Office then Chromebooks would take off. Eliminating the support issues for Windows would be a big deal.

by Zhyl 9y ago

richardwhiuk 9y ago

Windows is extremely well sunk into the enterprise market, and neither Linux nor Mac are at all focusing sufficiently on it to displace them. Linux isn't user friendly enough, and Mac's support policy is a complete no go for enterprise.

brianwawok 9y ago
Every enterprise I have worked at had both linux and mac available to developers. Is this not your experience? You seem to present as truth the opposite of what I have lived.
- blackoil 9y ago
  Developers make a very small percentage of overall enterprise market.
- jeff_petersen 9y ago
  In my (bigcorp) experience, its all windows all the way with macs available only to developers who have a need (iOS dev usually). And don’t forget that developers are a tiny minority of employees.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    As seemingly ubiquitous as Macbooks are, their market share has never really budged. It's been 3-5% for the entirety of the OS X era.
    - jorvi 9y ago
      That's because there has never been a <$999 MacBook. If you purely start to look at the Ultrabook segment then MacBooks have an absolutely staggering market share.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        I seldom see any Macs around in most southern European countries, but I do see ultrabook PCs running Windows like the Asus ones.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I never worked on an enterprise with GNU/Linux worstations on their IT policy, on some companies IT tolerated rebel developers provided they took care 100% of integration issues with the company network and official tools. Macs are usually only available to upper management, unless required for iOS development, in which case they are part of a pool shared among project teams.
- dagw 9y ago
  Is this not your experience? Not at all. Linux can sometimes be made available on servers if necessary, but if you want Linux on your desktop you have to use a VM (ideally without telling IT). Never worked at a large place where Macs where readily available. Macs used to be more popular ~10 years ago or so with the marketing and communications people doing a lot of DTP and design work, but even that seems to have greatly decreased.
  - jmkni 9y ago
    In my experience, it’s depressingly common for companies to have one single Mac that they dust off once a year to test something in Safari.
- MagnumOpus 9y ago
  "Developers" are a miniscule share of "enterprise". We are talking about the billion computers on corporate office workers' desks, not about the maybe-a-million computers of web/network/systems developers. Counter-anecdote: every place I worked at including 4-5 major companies in various industries had compulsory windows desktops for everyone. The few of us that also had a Linux (or AIX/HP-UX/...) machines that we did our work on, SSHd into those machines.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  What OS were the other 98% (i.e. non-devs) of employees using?
  - herbst 9y ago
    Usually Mac in my experience because nobody on their right mind would bother with Windows in a working environment.
    - chrisper 9y ago
      Except people who do .NET development, no? I wish I could use Linux, but I can't since I am working on WPF stuff.
    - EpicEng 9y ago
      Then I guess the vast majority of people are insane because Mac use in Enterprise is essentially non-existent.
      - herbst 9y ago
        To be fair in my limited experience it is true. I live and work and Switzerland, the majority of customers i faced with, i.e. medium to bigger companies, universities and gov agencies all used Macs. I travelled as Digitalnomad, and went to plenty meetups around Startups, Entrepreneurship and other not 100% tech things. Clear mac dominance as well. However i work with Rails, Python and fancy things. I know if i would look into .NET/suit wearing side of things, things would look very different.
herbst 9y ago
If a Ubuntu in 2017 isn't user friendly I really don't know what that phrase is even supposed to mean.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I lost access to my netbook $HOME, when Ubuntu just refused to acknowledge the existence the file system after freezing in X. It required a boot direct into the GRUB root console and running fsck from there. Not something that regular macOS and Windows users expect as user friendly.
  - hollander 9y ago
    I've helped people who lost access to their Windows 7 home directory. It didn't mean they ended up in commandline mode, but it meant their home folder was recreated from scratch. Many things didn't work anymore. I bet 99% of Windows users can't solve that by themselves. I don't see any difference with your problem. The problem you describe is bad as you can't use the computer at all, while my problem created a false illusion that the home folder was OK as it was still there. That the old one was renamed, made invisible, and then the new one got the old name - didn't help at all.
- isolli 9y ago
  Just one example: every few weeks I need to manually remove old images as described here [0], otherwise security updates won't be installed. Four versions and four years later, it's still not fixed. [0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-space-when-upgrading https://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-...
- OoooooooO 9y ago
  Ubuntu did not enable the energy saving options by default on my notebook and did not install the wifi drivers out of the box. Which was a "bit" painful because the office is wifi only and getting online then is impossible. Had to hunt down the driver, put it on a stick and install them. Never again. And the laptop was 5+ years old ...
- 9y ago

yoz-y 9y ago

They have a lot going for them in the desktop market still. Apple targets only the high end market (at least in terms of prices), Chromebooks come with a set of constraints that many can not overcome.

keypress 9y ago

Partner has a Chromebook, and it's really rough around the edges. 'Simple' things like file management/association is a pain. And it's been pretty buggy. Vanilla OS with no 3rd party plugins. If the OS is neglected and not matured it could easily go the same way.

coldtea 9y ago

>I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks. It's simple: Chromebooks are crippled by the mostly-web concept and Macbooks only cater to (a part of) the more affluent end of the market.

mark-r 9y ago
I worked in IT support for a while, and saw that many business apps are expected to come with a browser interface now. If companies could be weaned from their dependence on Office then Chromebooks would take off. Eliminating the support issues for Windows would be a big deal.