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 will add this, though...the move away from Windows desktops will save an incredible amount of money. So much of IT expenses go to just cleaning up desktop machines from spyware/junkware/etc.
Remember why Microsoft was successful in the Enterprise...”Nobody ever got fired for using Microsoft.”
Did those departments dance around the table like they do in the surface commercial?
Heh heh, thankfully no.
Still waiting to see the mythical open source Exchange killer........
IMHO, the whole high tech industry is in danger.
Product life span is now so short that product development costs are not recovered in sales.
If you can’t make a profit in building a widget, why have a company.
MS’s problem is they still don’t listen to customers and all the executives spend more time involved in social experiments than running their company.
I know there are good wp programs. It’s just that MSFT doesn’t have one.
Because they need real computers.
It’s not competition killing Microsoft, it’s Microsoft killing itself. Windows 8 is hated by most users. They changed closing a program from a single click to a click and a swipe. The goal is to make things quicker and easier, not more time consuming.
Microsoft was succesful in the enterprise because they worked at it. While IBM and MS were working to get PC's talking to IBM mainframes, Apple had nothing but contempt for the very idea. That was beneath them and they said so.
The only way that iPads and Tablets and mobile devices will replace personal computers is if they can find a way to shrink the human finger and reconfigure the human eye.
I forsee when tablets will have the ability to produce a holographic keyboard, that would be the size of a traditional keyboard.
the only reason I use Windows is Games ,getting games to run on Linux can be a real pain ,if they could make them easy to install and run like windows ,we would dump windows
Wonder how they can get the Surface to play with the XBox.
In the old days, it was not necessary to say "cursive" when referencing "writing". Just another dumb PC addition....
Their elephant is Excel, the most widely used app in the enterprise world. More than just spreadsheets, it’s also imbeded marcos to call internal databases inside the firewall and external databases via the net.
It will take a long time for enterprises to wean themselves off Excel. Change is risk. There has to be a good reason for the the risk.
Now extending to tablets is a different question. Microsoft should concentrate on Office on Tablet functionality. Its their ace, play it wisely.
I’m a systems guy, so I’m accustomed to Active Directory, Exchange, and server OS. Knowing how reluctant companies can be to upgrade, I have no doubt that there will be plenty of work for me for a couple decades. I AM seeing a shift in server hardware toward consolidated platforms (i.e. Cisco blade systems), but the OS world will be hard to change for a while yet.
Exactly.
RE: More than just spreadsheets, it’s also imbeded marcos to call internal databases inside the firewall and external databases via the net.
Why can’t Apple or Google create spreadsheet peoducts that compete with Excel?
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