4 ms·

Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already

Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.

john_strinlai 7mo ago
>gradually and then suddenly. governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines. 20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" today.
- homarp 7mo ago
  and then something like COVID happens and they change fast.
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    expanding your vpn to support more employees working from home is much easier than replacing hundreds of thousands of machines, all of the windows-only software that runs on those machines, training all of your employees on a new operating system, cancelling all of your existing contracts... you get the point.
    - homarp 7mo ago
      well, it happened with Teams meetings replacing fancy CISCO equipments. It happened with all the vpn+shared drives buried to just use SPO. different experience,I guess. Did your employees got trained? or just sent the link to 3 'online trainings'? Managers manage to switch to Mac seamlessly. I am sure the rest will follow with cheaper macs now available. And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)
      - john_strinlai 7mo ago
        >And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian) office is a tiny, almost negligible, piece of the puzzle. quickbooks, solidworks and other cad software, bespoke software, security software, user management, permissions management (replacing active directory), contractual obligations, the millions of dollars required in implementation, the millions more dollars required for increased user support, and so on... but, again, just to reiterate: i am disputing that windows is in "significant danger" today.
- Orygin 7mo ago
  Still, a lot of those woke up from a profound sleep about digital sovereignty and are now contemplating leaving the American software ecosystem. It won't be sudden, until it is
- jon-wood 7mo ago
  You can't suddenly replace them, but in a lot of cases you can find that over an extended period more and more people choose the MacBook option from IT rather than the Windows one.
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    most people are not willing to learn an entire new operating system for no reason, though. this might happen in tech-based companies, sure, but banks? accounting firms? ive never seen them offer macbooks. this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government). point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.
    - olyjohn 7mo ago
      Most people dont even use the operating system. They look for the apps menu, then click what they want to run. Most people can switch between OSes easier than you think because there really isn't that much difference in how they work on the surface.
      - john_strinlai 7mo ago
        users are one component, but you are still ignoring/forgetting the rest. user management, file management, security, windows-specific software, auditing requirements, required capital investment, lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on.
        LtWorf 7mo ago
        > lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on. Wasn't this a microsoft marketing campaign like 20 years ago? Are we still on it?
    - jon-wood 7mo ago
      An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine, or only occasionally having done so when it was absolutely necessary.
- jerf 7mo ago
  "Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow. It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away. To put it another way, the thresholds where people get annoyed enough to quit are highly correlated to each other. If individuals on HN are posting "I don't want to switch, I've been working this way for decades now, but Windows has crossed the line for me, I've switched to Linux, and it was easier than I thought it would be", then corporations and governments are having very similar deliberations internally. This is probably a more accurate model for how "influencers" seem to work than the idea that some crazy guy in your organization falls in love with Product X and evangelizes it internally. I'm sure that happens and is a real force, but this correlation-of-experience effect is probably bigger on the whole. If Product X was good enough to make an evangelist internally, or more germane to this conversation, to make some a mortal enemy of it internally, it's usually because it was a good enough or bad enough product to be able to do that in the first place, and eventually everyone will figure it out in exactly the same way, just later. 20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. If Microsoft responds correctly that might be good, but if they just decide to rest on their laurels and extract whatever value they can out of Windows while they can, Windows would never last 20 years of that. Even the slowest organizations can move faster than that. After all, to cut Microsoft's revenues off at the knees, they don't need to remove every last Windows 2000 server in their backoffice they can't upgrade, they need to cut out just the majority of desktop licenses.
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    >20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few years at least, etc. not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective). time will tell! i have first-hand experience with how fast banks move, so i will stick by my 20 year minimum. happy to see otherwise, though. in any case. what i replied to was a claim that windows is in "significant danger" today. it is not.
- thesuitonym 7mo ago
  And how many times this year have you seen a headline with some European country's government starting to migrate away from Microsoft?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    a couple? and as far as i know, none of them have completed the transition. it is great that some are starting, seriously. but windows is not in significant danger as of today.
phendrenad2 7mo ago
Wait, I'm confused, are you calling moving from Windows to Linux a "decline"? Because I can agree with that ;)
- danaris 7mo ago
  "Decline" in people's trust in a particular platform, in this case. Or the decline of the platform or company itself.
tomwheeler 7mo ago
And I'd imagine that this decline accelerates as _developers_ begin migrating to other platforms, since the applications they created are what made that platform appealing to non-developers. That's why Steve Ballmer was jumping up and down, shouting, in a sweaty fervor. Say what you want about pre-Nadella Microsoft, but they definitely recognized the importance of having lots of developers writing software for Windows. And they treated developers like VIPs.
- chii 7mo ago
  > decline accelerates as _developers_ begin migrating to other platforms developers don't control what platforms an enterprise would use. Vendors don't dictate the platform either - vendors sell to a customer, and so it makes sense that the customer dictates the platform. when migration to different platform happens, it's because there's something disruptive that enterprises need to move to, or a new class of enterprise without existing/legacy baggage sees competitive advantage in moving. This happened to IBM when their mainframes no longer offered competitive advantage over the newly minted PC platforms. If/when windows become lackluster in terms of a required feature, or did not keep up with a needed feature that an alternative platform provides, then the switch will happen fast. What that feature might be i dont know - if i knew, i'd be making it.
  - tomwheeler 7mo ago
    > developers don't control what platforms an enterprise would use They might not control it directly, but they absolutely influence it. Linux was on the losing end of this for many years, as common end-user enterprise software was native and only available for Windows (or in the case of Microsoft Office, nominally available for Mac OS but with fewer features and lots more bugs). That was Microsoft's moat and it started leaking when web applications became ubiquitous. That leak later accelerated when those web applications had to work on mobile operating systems (namely iOS and Android) that Microsoft did not own and could not control. > Vendors don't dictate the platform either - vendors sell to a customer, > and so it makes sense that the customer dictates the platform. There are plenty of counterexamples here. I used to have two legacy SGI machines in my cubicle at work precisely because a vendor dictated the platform to that Very Big Enterprise company many years earlier. Similarly, many people buy Macs solely to run Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro, because the vendor (Apple) dictated the platform by discontinuing the Windows versions. Apple doesn't have the market share Microsoft has, but unlike Microsoft, they can maintain strong control because of their breadth (OS and hardware for desktop, tablet, and phone, plus high-end creative software) and because a lot of their customers are all-in on Apple's ecosystem.
Atlas26 7mo ago
> Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This comment is multiple years out of date at this point…Lunar lake was considered an exceptionally successful Mobile processor platform that was extremely competitive with Apple M series chips, Panther lake is supposedly improving on that by an even greater degree, and Nova lake is supposedly an extremely promising upcoming desktop platform, and their Arc graphics are excellent for the price point. This is like writing off MacBooks during their thin and hot touchbar/butterfly keyboard era and then assuming they’re that way still in 2026 when they’re now extremely well received laptops lol
- ninjagoo 7mo ago
  I do believe the OP's comparison was with AMD, not Apple. Intel has fallen into financial difficulties following product failures and AMD's strong competition, a far cry from Intel's heydays. Apple barely comes into the picture, with less than 10% of the worldwide PC market, and was not a factor in Intel's decline.
legacynl 7mo ago
Perhaps on the consumer front. But if you have some 30yr old factory with machines, those machines probably use windows software, and you can be reasonably sure that that software will still run in 20 years. It's not like apple just deciding that we don't do 32bit applications anymore all of a sudden. However many ads MS will shove in windows, as long as they can run software that they depend on, companies and factories won't care.
heelix 7mo ago
I resemble that remark. I've got to wonder how many people are starting to cut over to Linux/Mac or just stopped caring about being patched on Win10. A couple weekends ago, I made the overdue call to kill my dual booting with Windows 10 and go full Linux. I'd considered finding a copy of the embedded Win10 long term version or paying for the patching. The local account was one of the things holding me back from doing the update. I knew I could muck with things to still have it, but figured it would be yoinked away later. Similar thoughts to updating the old threadripper that no longer qualifies for Win11. The reinforcement came from all the blasted copilot integration -- notepad, paint... just looking like evasiveness was going to be everywhere. For a long time my 'good' box was Linux, my old box was Windows. So much just works. I still have an M2 with Windows 10 on it, but it is not in any machine right now. Will see if I run out of space and need it before they actually provide something I'd want to even have on my desk.

Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.

john_strinlai 7mo ago

>gradually and then suddenly. governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines. 20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" today.

homarp 7mo ago
and then something like COVID happens and they change fast.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  expanding your vpn to support more employees working from home is much easier than replacing hundreds of thousands of machines, all of the windows-only software that runs on those machines, training all of your employees on a new operating system, cancelling all of your existing contracts... you get the point.
  - homarp 7mo ago
    well, it happened with Teams meetings replacing fancy CISCO equipments. It happened with all the vpn+shared drives buried to just use SPO. different experience,I guess. Did your employees got trained? or just sent the link to 3 'online trainings'? Managers manage to switch to Mac seamlessly. I am sure the rest will follow with cheaper macs now available. And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)
    - john_strinlai 7mo ago
      >And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian) office is a tiny, almost negligible, piece of the puzzle. quickbooks, solidworks and other cad software, bespoke software, security software, user management, permissions management (replacing active directory), contractual obligations, the millions of dollars required in implementation, the millions more dollars required for increased user support, and so on... but, again, just to reiterate: i am disputing that windows is in "significant danger" today.
Orygin 7mo ago
Still, a lot of those woke up from a profound sleep about digital sovereignty and are now contemplating leaving the American software ecosystem. It won't be sudden, until it is
jon-wood 7mo ago
You can't suddenly replace them, but in a lot of cases you can find that over an extended period more and more people choose the MacBook option from IT rather than the Windows one.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  most people are not willing to learn an entire new operating system for no reason, though. this might happen in tech-based companies, sure, but banks? accounting firms? ive never seen them offer macbooks. this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government). point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.
  - olyjohn 7mo ago
    Most people dont even use the operating system. They look for the apps menu, then click what they want to run. Most people can switch between OSes easier than you think because there really isn't that much difference in how they work on the surface.
    - john_strinlai 7mo ago
      users are one component, but you are still ignoring/forgetting the rest. user management, file management, security, windows-specific software, auditing requirements, required capital investment, lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on.
      - LtWorf 7mo ago
        > lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on. Wasn't this a microsoft marketing campaign like 20 years ago? Are we still on it?
  - jon-wood 7mo ago
    An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine, or only occasionally having done so when it was absolutely necessary.
jerf 7mo ago
"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow. It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away. To put it another way, the thresholds where people get annoyed enough to quit are highly correlated to each other. If individuals on HN are posting "I don't want to switch, I've been working this way for decades now, but Windows has crossed the line for me, I've switched to Linux, and it was easier than I thought it would be", then corporations and governments are having very similar deliberations internally. This is probably a more accurate model for how "influencers" seem to work than the idea that some crazy guy in your organization falls in love with Product X and evangelizes it internally. I'm sure that happens and is a real force, but this correlation-of-experience effect is probably bigger on the whole. If Product X was good enough to make an evangelist internally, or more germane to this conversation, to make some a mortal enemy of it internally, it's usually because it was a good enough or bad enough product to be able to do that in the first place, and eventually everyone will figure it out in exactly the same way, just later. 20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. If Microsoft responds correctly that might be good, but if they just decide to rest on their laurels and extract whatever value they can out of Windows while they can, Windows would never last 20 years of that. Even the slowest organizations can move faster than that. After all, to cut Microsoft's revenues off at the knees, they don't need to remove every last Windows 2000 server in their backoffice they can't upgrade, they need to cut out just the majority of desktop licenses.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  >20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few years at least, etc. not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective). time will tell! i have first-hand experience with how fast banks move, so i will stick by my 20 year minimum. happy to see otherwise, though. in any case. what i replied to was a claim that windows is in "significant danger" today. it is not.
thesuitonym 7mo ago
And how many times this year have you seen a headline with some European country's government starting to migrate away from Microsoft?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  a couple? and as far as i know, none of them have completed the transition. it is great that some are starting, seriously. but windows is not in significant danger as of today.

phendrenad2 7mo ago

Wait, I'm confused, are you calling moving from Windows to Linux a "decline"? Because I can agree with that ;)

danaris 7mo ago
"Decline" in people's trust in a particular platform, in this case. Or the decline of the platform or company itself.

tomwheeler 7mo ago

And I'd imagine that this decline accelerates as _developers_ begin migrating to other platforms, since the applications they created are what made that platform appealing to non-developers. That's why Steve Ballmer was jumping up and down, shouting, in a sweaty fervor. Say what you want about pre-Nadella Microsoft, but they definitely recognized the importance of having lots of developers writing software for Windows. And they treated developers like VIPs.

chii 7mo ago
> decline accelerates as _developers_ begin migrating to other platforms developers don't control what platforms an enterprise would use. Vendors don't dictate the platform either - vendors sell to a customer, and so it makes sense that the customer dictates the platform. when migration to different platform happens, it's because there's something disruptive that enterprises need to move to, or a new class of enterprise without existing/legacy baggage sees competitive advantage in moving. This happened to IBM when their mainframes no longer offered competitive advantage over the newly minted PC platforms. If/when windows become lackluster in terms of a required feature, or did not keep up with a needed feature that an alternative platform provides, then the switch will happen fast. What that feature might be i dont know - if i knew, i'd be making it.
- tomwheeler 7mo ago
  > developers don't control what platforms an enterprise would use They might not control it directly, but they absolutely influence it. Linux was on the losing end of this for many years, as common end-user enterprise software was native and only available for Windows (or in the case of Microsoft Office, nominally available for Mac OS but with fewer features and lots more bugs). That was Microsoft's moat and it started leaking when web applications became ubiquitous. That leak later accelerated when those web applications had to work on mobile operating systems (namely iOS and Android) that Microsoft did not own and could not control. > Vendors don't dictate the platform either - vendors sell to a customer, > and so it makes sense that the customer dictates the platform. There are plenty of counterexamples here. I used to have two legacy SGI machines in my cubicle at work precisely because a vendor dictated the platform to that Very Big Enterprise company many years earlier. Similarly, many people buy Macs solely to run Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro, because the vendor (Apple) dictated the platform by discontinuing the Windows versions. Apple doesn't have the market share Microsoft has, but unlike Microsoft, they can maintain strong control because of their breadth (OS and hardware for desktop, tablet, and phone, plus high-end creative software) and because a lot of their customers are all-in on Apple's ecosystem.

Atlas26 7mo ago

> Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This comment is multiple years out of date at this point…Lunar lake was considered an exceptionally successful Mobile processor platform that was extremely competitive with Apple M series chips, Panther lake is supposedly improving on that by an even greater degree, and Nova lake is supposedly an extremely promising upcoming desktop platform, and their Arc graphics are excellent for the price point. This is like writing off MacBooks during their thin and hot touchbar/butterfly keyboard era and then assuming they’re that way still in 2026 when they’re now extremely well received laptops lol

ninjagoo 7mo ago
I do believe the OP's comparison was with AMD, not Apple. Intel has fallen into financial difficulties following product failures and AMD's strong competition, a far cry from Intel's heydays. Apple barely comes into the picture, with less than 10% of the worldwide PC market, and was not a factor in Intel's decline.

legacynl 7mo ago

Perhaps on the consumer front. But if you have some 30yr old factory with machines, those machines probably use windows software, and you can be reasonably sure that that software will still run in 20 years. It's not like apple just deciding that we don't do 32bit applications anymore all of a sudden. However many ads MS will shove in windows, as long as they can run software that they depend on, companies and factories won't care.

heelix 7mo ago

I resemble that remark. I've got to wonder how many people are starting to cut over to Linux/Mac or just stopped caring about being patched on Win10. A couple weekends ago, I made the overdue call to kill my dual booting with Windows 10 and go full Linux. I'd considered finding a copy of the embedded Win10 long term version or paying for the patching. The local account was one of the things holding me back from doing the update. I knew I could muck with things to still have it, but figured it would be yoinked away later. Similar thoughts to updating the old threadripper that no longer qualifies for Win11. The reinforcement came from all the blasted copilot integration -- notepad, paint... just looking like evasiveness was going to be everywhere. For a long time my 'good' box was Linux, my old box was Windows. So much just works. I still have an M2 with Windows 10 on it, but it is not in any machine right now. Will see if I run out of space and need it before they actually provide something I'd want to even have on my desk.