4 ms·

A nice rant from John C. Dvorak. First though surely MS have to work out what a Windows PC is for in 2014 and beyond. (I accept their true response would be so

by bdfh42 13y ago

A nice rant from John C. Dvorak. First though surely MS have to work out what a Windows PC is for in 2014 and beyond. (I accept their true response would be something like "make money on every PC sold like we always did"). Chromebooks have demonstrated a minimalist PC for our age. Now what value can Windows deliver on top of that? I think that is difficult to answer from a consumer's point of view. There might be a business angle but (for me) it is still not clear.

kfk 13y ago
Ms Office, really. Take that away and businesses will move to other OSes. Everybody is tired of the constant poor quality of Microsoft products.
- commandar 13y ago
  I've made this argument before, but I've always found Microsoft's recent obsession with killing the desktop as hugely harmful to their own business. The fact is, Microsoft has seen this future coming for some time. They got themselves into antitrust trouble for going after Netscape and Java so aggressively in the 90s because they were afraid of OSes becoming commodity software. So, how have they reacted to a world where operating systems are increasingly commodity software? By throwing their competitive advantages in their bread and butter market -- the enterprise -- out the window (no pun intended). Applications have to be rewritten to run on Metro (and thus the cheap RT devices they so desperately want to compete with the iPad), central management of RT devices is not any real improvement over other devices, and whereas in the past they made the mistake of trying to shoehorn a desktop OS onto a touch device (e.g., XP Tablet Edition), now they've gone the complete opposite direction and tried to make a touch-centric interface designed for small screens in a world where 24-27" displays aren't uncommon. While Microsoft needed to do something to stay relevant, they've so badly mismanaged the transition that I think the end result is going to be an acceleration in line of business applications moving to web applications that run anywhere. Again, that's something that's already happening, but the entire W8/RT thing has done Microsoft absolutely no favors.
  - hnalias7 13y ago
    It's funny that a company can be so lost while there are so many technology folks and enthusiast that are clearly laying out the solutions for them. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens to this company over the next 10 years.
    - pmelendez 13y ago
      Except that those "solutions" might not necessarily work either. I had even read on HN people arguing that the solution would be MS to fork android (something that we had seen already) or just stay still and don't do anything (again we had seen that before too) The way I see it, MS started to get lost once they "accomplished" their mission "computer on every desk". At that point they were just like "Now.. what?".
pmelendez 13y ago
>"Chromebooks have demonstrated a minimalist PC for our age. Now what value can Windows deliver on top of that?" It depends on your definition for "value" here. For instance, for me "value" would be to create content in a comfortable way even if I am offline. So, since I can't edit a video, develop an app or edit a photo being offline during my commute to work, it is very unlikely that I will get one, and hence they have very limited value "to me".

by bdfh42 13y ago

kfk 13y ago

Ms Office, really. Take that away and businesses will move to other OSes. Everybody is tired of the constant poor quality of Microsoft products.

commandar 13y ago
I've made this argument before, but I've always found Microsoft's recent obsession with killing the desktop as hugely harmful to their own business. The fact is, Microsoft has seen this future coming for some time. They got themselves into antitrust trouble for going after Netscape and Java so aggressively in the 90s because they were afraid of OSes becoming commodity software. So, how have they reacted to a world where operating systems are increasingly commodity software? By throwing their competitive advantages in their bread and butter market -- the enterprise -- out the window (no pun intended). Applications have to be rewritten to run on Metro (and thus the cheap RT devices they so desperately want to compete with the iPad), central management of RT devices is not any real improvement over other devices, and whereas in the past they made the mistake of trying to shoehorn a desktop OS onto a touch device (e.g., XP Tablet Edition), now they've gone the complete opposite direction and tried to make a touch-centric interface designed for small screens in a world where 24-27" displays aren't uncommon. While Microsoft needed to do something to stay relevant, they've so badly mismanaged the transition that I think the end result is going to be an acceleration in line of business applications moving to web applications that run anywhere. Again, that's something that's already happening, but the entire W8/RT thing has done Microsoft absolutely no favors.
- hnalias7 13y ago
  It's funny that a company can be so lost while there are so many technology folks and enthusiast that are clearly laying out the solutions for them. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens to this company over the next 10 years.
  - pmelendez 13y ago
    Except that those "solutions" might not necessarily work either. I had even read on HN people arguing that the solution would be MS to fork android (something that we had seen already) or just stay still and don't do anything (again we had seen that before too) The way I see it, MS started to get lost once they "accomplished" their mission "computer on every desk". At that point they were just like "Now.. what?".

pmelendez 13y ago

>"Chromebooks have demonstrated a minimalist PC for our age. Now what value can Windows deliver on top of that?" It depends on your definition for "value" here. For instance, for me "value" would be to create content in a comfortable way even if I am offline. So, since I can't edit a video, develop an app or edit a photo being offline during my commute to work, it is very unlikely that I will get one, and hence they have very limited value "to me".