Posted on 04/04/2013 7:28:41 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Microsoft faces a slide into irrelevance in the next four years unless it can make progress in the smartphone and tablet markets, because the PC market will continue shrinking, warns the research group Gartner.
It says a huge and disruptive shift is underway, in which more and more people will use a tablet as their main computing device, researchers say.
That will also see shipments of Android devices dwarf those of Windows PCs and phones by 2017. Microsoft-powered device shipments will almost be at parity with those of Apple iPhones and iPads - the latter a situation not seen since the 1980s.
In a new forecast published on Thursday morning, Gartner says that by 2015 shipments of tablets will outstrip those of conventional PCs such as desktops and notebooks, as Android and Apple's iOS become increasingly dominant in the overall operating system picture. Android in particular will be installed on more than a billion devices shipped in 2014, says Carolina Milanesi, the analyst who led the research.
Meanwhile a new category of "ultramobile" devices - such as the Surface Pro and the lighter ultrabook laptops - will become increasingly important as people shift towards more mobile forms of computing.
For Microsoft, this poses an important inflexion point in its history, warns Milanesi. "Winning in the tablet and phone space is critical for them to remain relevant in this shift," she told the Guardian. "We're talking about hardware displacement here - but this shift also has wider implications for operating systems and apps. What happens, for instance, when [Microsoft] Office isn't the best way to be productive in your work?"
For Microsoft, income from Windows and Office licences are key to its revenues: per-PC Windows licences generate about 50% of its profits, and Office licences almost all the rest.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I still think they can replace PCs with MS tablets in the Enterprise, but it will be a few years to transition.
We are already starting a trial at my company to replace some departments PCs with Surface tablets. We shall see.
KEY POINTS:
1) While Microsoft dominates the PC market, it is a distant third in the smartphone and tablet markets. Latest figures suggest that Windows Phone, its smartphone OS, shipped on about 3% of devices in fourth quarter of 2012, compared to 20% for Apple’s iPhone and over 70% for Android - of which 50% connected to Google’s servers and 20% were “white box” Android phones in China which do not use Google services.
2) A key problem for Microsoft is that it is the people who don’t yet own PCs - in emerging markets such as Africa and China - who are most likely to have a smartphone and tablet as their first “computer”. They’re starting with a smartphone, not a PC, so when they’re looking for something larger, they look at something that’s a replacement smartphone experience - which is a tablet or ultramobile device. And Android or [Apple’s] iOS are the two that they’re looking at.
3) Microsoft could then face the vicious circle where developers considering which platform to develop apps for look at those with the largest user base - and that that will not be Windows. By 2017, the number of devices being shipped with iOS, both iPhones and iPads, will be close to that with Windows and Windows Phone combined.
RE: We are already starting a trial at my company to replace some departments PCs with Surface tablets.
Why not iPads or Android based Tablets?
Microsoft Office.
Step 1: Write a word processing app that works.
December 2008 - Apple has just Killed Microsoft. (irrelevant in a year).
December 2005 - Microsoft to be Irrelevant Soon.
2004 - $2 Billion Payout to Sun makes Microsoft Irrelevant.
Hmmm - I think I like their odds.
Can’t happen soon enough, always been a fan of the open software movement and Linux. Too many bug fixes in MS and huge hogs of resources.
I like MS Visual Studio.
I’ve been using the MS IDE for more than twenty years, and I’ve gotten used to it. For me, anything else (including NetBeans) is a PITA.
So, what happens to Visual Studio in the age of Tablets and Smart phones?
There is some truth to this, but it is a little exaggerated. Dealing with IT on a daily basis, I have seen the shift to tablets/smartphones, but people use them primarily for email and web browsing.
Almost every company has an internal program that requires some antiquated Windows application. More and more, I’ve had to set up VMs or other solutions to run these things, but they still use them on a daily basis. Heck, I still see *DOS* programs from time to time.
So, while Windows is fading from the personal/home market, it will hang around for a while in business environments. It might be used through remote connections from an iPad, though.
PCs aren’t going to completely go away, just as mainframes will not completely go away.
They’re doing it to themselves.
Microsoft is becoming completely irrelevant from an OS standpoint, because they’re trying to compete with everyone on everything. If they focus solely on desktop and server operating systems, they might have a chance. Instead, they release another “beta” OS in Win8, a crap “touch screen” server OS in 2012, and a tablet that offers nothing new compared to the iPad or Google products.
My skills will go the way of the dodo, because I’ve staked my career on Windows product knowledge. I might do some consulting to get companies off of the old MS stuff, but I’ll probably go into technical writing, my academic background.
They have tons of cash....they can buy brains with it...as long as they can do that, they will be around.
Anyone remember the Microsoft monopoly?
Google will go the same way, eventually.
But there’s one monopoly that never goes away. The government.
“Microsoft Office.”
Doesn’t Google have most of this?
How about Apache OpenOffice? http://www.openoffice.org/why/
Plus, it is free. Now to one has to pay attention when downloading and installing it to get rid of the commercials but I have done it on a number of computers. The only thing it does not have is an e-mail model like Outlook.
.NET will be the new COBOL, maybe not the most hip technology, but millions of business systems will still be running on it for years to come.
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