5 ms·

Ok, thanks for letting me know. > Microsoft's Windows was the dominant desktop operating system (OS) worldwide as of February 2024, with a market share of arou

Ok, thanks for letting me know. > Microsoft's Windows was the dominant desktop operating system (OS) worldwide as of February 2024, with a market share of around 72 percent. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

mattcantstop 2y ago
What Paul wrote in 2007 could be true, while what you wrote about Microsoft in 2024 could also be true. Microsoft changed. And for the better. The death was short lived, but in many ways, especially in the cultural zeitgeist of software engineers and tech folk, Microsoft did die there for a bit. Satya did a great job of resurrecting it. He has been masterful in his role (I worked at a company that was acquired by Microsoft). Companies who were once the 900 pound gorilla can die, despite making a lot of money. Oracle still prints money, but how many people under 50 use Oracle on a day to day basis when they are building a company? I would venture to say approaching zero. Google is still printing money, but in many ways it is dead (or dying).
- talldayo 2y ago
  > Microsoft did die there for a bit. I just don't believe this. It's like saying that Apple "did die there for a bit" when they were selling shitty Intel Macs; it's not true. They were still alive, well, and had a significant market share of incredibly enthusiastic customers. Microsoft had been a Department of Defense contractor for more than 20 years at the time PG published this. His conclusion was narrow-minded then, and it's narrow-minded today.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Apple is only alive because Microsoft needed competition to keep the DOJ from going after them again.
  - discreteevent 2y ago
    > but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world > I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Funny how PG didn't have enough perspective to realize that he himself could be the one in a different world. A bright guy, but like you say - narrow-minded.
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    In the mid-90s, Apple was much deader than Microsoft ever was, and that was long before the transition to Intel.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- dartos 2y ago
  As a developer, I have a really poor view of companies that choose to go with Microsoft technologies (other than typescript) It’s purely a cultural thing, but from where I’ve worked and what I’ve seen, companies who choose Microsoft stacks and services (azure, C#, windows server, etc) are very management heavy and most are hostile towards their engineers, whom they see as cost centers. I think that stigma still clings to Microsoft today
  - fallingsquirrel 2y ago
    > other than typescript Don't forget GitHub, NPM, and VSCode. Microsoft has entrenched themselves deeper than it first appears.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Vscode isn’t usually mandated in my experience. And yes npm and github as well, but both of those were fairly recent acquisitions.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Those are my biases, too, but there's a generation under me (I'm a bit oldish) that doesn't see things that way. Witness how C# has a toehold in games development (via Unity) and that isn't seen as incogruous at all. And then look at the prevalence of VS Code, and the market penetration of GitHub...
    - dartos 2y ago
      Games industry is a bit of an oddball. Microsoft’s XNA framework was quite good early on. But unity alone really popularized c# in gamedev. Also Xamarin allowing a single codebase for android and iOS was a driving factor as well. So c# is a must, but teams, office, and exchange, and windows server are not.
- ysofunny 2y ago
  but Oracle, in a certain (here) context, is just a RDBMS how many people are using relational databases in their companies? or even how many accounting systems are using RDBMSs behind the scenes? I would venture every single last one of them
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pavlov 2y ago
  > "Oracle still prints money, but how many people under 50 use Oracle on a day to day basis when they are building a company? I would venture to say approaching zero." Oracle is having something of a resurrection moment lately, with Oracle Cloud becoming a surprisingly popular option for startups. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startups-find-an-unlikely-friend-oracle https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startups-find-an-... "At least six venture-backed AI startups, including Character.ai and Adept AI Labs, primarily rely on Oracle for cloud computing, according to the companies. Two founders of AI startups who have used various cloud providers told The Information that Oracle can run complex machine-learning models more economically than Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud."
  - treprinum 2y ago
    They are giving out huge amount of free credits to startups.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      In a sense Nadella’s Microsoft also bribed their way into popularity with startups, with both free cloud services as well as free software like VS Code.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  > Satya did a great job of resurrecting it. I don’t think he did. They are not the innovative company they were under Satya. Sure the stock price is up by what are they actually doing? Office isn’t the force it was, teams and azure are just copying others and they utterly enshitified Windows. Xbox has also gone backwards.
- Xenoamorphous 2y ago
  As someone with no skin in the game and also someone who thinks that MS, Google, Apple, etc are not really “better” from an ethical standpoint than each other/any other big tech company: I always get the impression that Satya is a brilliant CEO and on the other hand Sundar is really not that good. Is this the general consensus?
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  > Microsoft changed. And for the better. But better for whom? Sometime after 2007, Microsoft: (1) rolled out unstoppable, inscrutable "telemetry" in Windows, (2) decided that "opt-out" was appropriate for privacy-invading features, and (3) decided it was okay to silently reset such opt-outs. (4) most recently, decided it's okay to violate copyright for any material they can scrape off the web, except for victims who can afford to fight Microsoft in court. I don't know any of their actual reasons for those policies, but as an end-user their reasons are indistinguishable from "because we can". IIRC, in the MS-DOS / Windows 2 up through ~early Windows 10 days, Microsoft's sleazy behavior was mostly limited to their interactions with other software companies.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Plenty, if they use anything Java related, even if it is only Android phones, those Google SDKs don't run out of thin air.
varjag 2y ago
What is the share of desktop systems among users in 2024?
- Max-q 2y ago
  68%, February 2024
aidenn0 2y ago
A) it was closer to 90% in the 00s, and what's Microsoft's share of the smartphone OS market these days?
- chrisjj 2y ago
  An 18% drop doesn't sound like death, does it?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
teknopaul 2y ago
You have to define "desktop" as not being a phone or tablet for that stat to be sane. I would argue the desktop itself changed. A wooden desk with a PC, a keyboard, mouse and monitor is likely to run Windows: until it's replaced by someone who isn't at a desk.
- skilled 2y ago
  You forgot laptops.

mattcantstop 2y ago

What Paul wrote in 2007 could be true, while what you wrote about Microsoft in 2024 could also be true. Microsoft changed. And for the better. The death was short lived, but in many ways, especially in the cultural zeitgeist of software engineers and tech folk, Microsoft did die there for a bit. Satya did a great job of resurrecting it. He has been masterful in his role (I worked at a company that was acquired by Microsoft). Companies who were once the 900 pound gorilla can die, despite making a lot of money. Oracle still prints money, but how many people under 50 use Oracle on a day to day basis when they are building a company? I would venture to say approaching zero. Google is still printing money, but in many ways it is dead (or dying).

talldayo 2y ago
> Microsoft did die there for a bit. I just don't believe this. It's like saying that Apple "did die there for a bit" when they were selling shitty Intel Macs; it's not true. They were still alive, well, and had a significant market share of incredibly enthusiastic customers. Microsoft had been a Department of Defense contractor for more than 20 years at the time PG published this. His conclusion was narrow-minded then, and it's narrow-minded today.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Apple is only alive because Microsoft needed competition to keep the DOJ from going after them again.
- discreteevent 2y ago
  > but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world > I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Funny how PG didn't have enough perspective to realize that he himself could be the one in a different world. A bright guy, but like you say - narrow-minded.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  In the mid-90s, Apple was much deader than Microsoft ever was, and that was long before the transition to Intel.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
dartos 2y ago
As a developer, I have a really poor view of companies that choose to go with Microsoft technologies (other than typescript) It’s purely a cultural thing, but from where I’ve worked and what I’ve seen, companies who choose Microsoft stacks and services (azure, C#, windows server, etc) are very management heavy and most are hostile towards their engineers, whom they see as cost centers. I think that stigma still clings to Microsoft today
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago
  > other than typescript Don't forget GitHub, NPM, and VSCode. Microsoft has entrenched themselves deeper than it first appears.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Vscode isn’t usually mandated in my experience. And yes npm and github as well, but both of those were fairly recent acquisitions.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Those are my biases, too, but there's a generation under me (I'm a bit oldish) that doesn't see things that way. Witness how C# has a toehold in games development (via Unity) and that isn't seen as incogruous at all. And then look at the prevalence of VS Code, and the market penetration of GitHub...
  - dartos 2y ago
    Games industry is a bit of an oddball. Microsoft’s XNA framework was quite good early on. But unity alone really popularized c# in gamedev. Also Xamarin allowing a single codebase for android and iOS was a driving factor as well. So c# is a must, but teams, office, and exchange, and windows server are not.
ysofunny 2y ago
but Oracle, in a certain (here) context, is just a RDBMS how many people are using relational databases in their companies? or even how many accounting systems are using RDBMSs behind the scenes? I would venture every single last one of them
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pavlov 2y ago
> "Oracle still prints money, but how many people under 50 use Oracle on a day to day basis when they are building a company? I would venture to say approaching zero." Oracle is having something of a resurrection moment lately, with Oracle Cloud becoming a surprisingly popular option for startups. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startups-find-an-unlikely-friend-oracle https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startups-find-an-... "At least six venture-backed AI startups, including Character.ai and Adept AI Labs, primarily rely on Oracle for cloud computing, according to the companies. Two founders of AI startups who have used various cloud providers told The Information that Oracle can run complex machine-learning models more economically than Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud."
- treprinum 2y ago
  They are giving out huge amount of free credits to startups.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    In a sense Nadella’s Microsoft also bribed their way into popularity with startups, with both free cloud services as well as free software like VS Code.
badgersnake 2y ago
> Satya did a great job of resurrecting it. I don’t think he did. They are not the innovative company they were under Satya. Sure the stock price is up by what are they actually doing? Office isn’t the force it was, teams and azure are just copying others and they utterly enshitified Windows. Xbox has also gone backwards.
Xenoamorphous 2y ago
As someone with no skin in the game and also someone who thinks that MS, Google, Apple, etc are not really “better” from an ethical standpoint than each other/any other big tech company: I always get the impression that Satya is a brilliant CEO and on the other hand Sundar is really not that good. Is this the general consensus?
CoastalCoder 2y ago
> Microsoft changed. And for the better. But better for whom? Sometime after 2007, Microsoft: (1) rolled out unstoppable, inscrutable "telemetry" in Windows, (2) decided that "opt-out" was appropriate for privacy-invading features, and (3) decided it was okay to silently reset such opt-outs. (4) most recently, decided it's okay to violate copyright for any material they can scrape off the web, except for victims who can afford to fight Microsoft in court. I don't know any of their actual reasons for those policies, but as an end-user their reasons are indistinguishable from "because we can". IIRC, in the MS-DOS / Windows 2 up through ~early Windows 10 days, Microsoft's sleazy behavior was mostly limited to their interactions with other software companies.
pjmlp 2y ago
Plenty, if they use anything Java related, even if it is only Android phones, those Google SDKs don't run out of thin air.

varjag 2y ago

What is the share of desktop systems among users in 2024?

Max-q 2y ago
68%, February 2024

aidenn0 2y ago

A) it was closer to 90% in the 00s, and what's Microsoft's share of the smartphone OS market these days?

chrisjj 2y ago
An 18% drop doesn't sound like death, does it?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

teknopaul 2y ago

You have to define "desktop" as not being a phone or tablet for that stat to be sane. I would argue the desktop itself changed. A wooden desk with a PC, a keyboard, mouse and monitor is likely to run Windows: until it's replaced by someone who isn't at a desk.

skilled 2y ago
You forgot laptops.