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 ...
Sure they can, but then you're going to have to port all of those old Excel macros over....don't see that as a real good cost/benefit trade-off.
Ewww...
IMO, the only thing that's at all interesting about MS Office is Access*, and with every new version they break the previous one. (i.e. importation-wise; I've not heard of a non-trivial DB/UI importing correctly.)
I'd much rather use WordPerfect than MS Word; I have a deep-seated resentment/aversion to PowerPoint (Army experience); and Outlook was craptacular [much of this is due to Outlook and Outlook Express being different enough that they really ought to have different names] last time I touched it; Excel... well, if you're not using it for finances you probably ought to be shot [too many admin/manager-types use it instead of DBs; I know I've had to deal with data-manipulation in spreadsheets that *REALLY* should have been in a DB].
* -- I'll give MS kudos for making DBs easily accessible, even if management-types seem to forgo it in favor of Excel.
>>> We are already starting a trial at my company to replace some departments PCs with Surface tablets. We shall see.
>>
>> Did those departments dance around the table like they do in the surface commercial?
>
>Heh heh, thankfully no.
Dang! You missed a great opportunity:
“Yes. That’s why it’s so important that you don’t neglect things like Dance-class while you’re in College.”
Microsoft bet big on the power of corporate inertia - and it has paid off so far with billions in Office upgrades and renewals.
Windows probably has no real future as a closed O/S, but it's all about how hard developers are going to laugh when they finally get a look at the internals. :)
For 500 years in the printing industry letters used for printing were called "typefaces," then along came PCs and everyone started calling them "fonts."
About the only deficiency it has is not being unicode; I find this understandable though, being a programmer, because transitioning to unicode is a big deal [lot of work] which would require a rewrite of things like basic search, and Corel has put WP into a corner and limited ongoing development/monies (Corel is really more focused on CorelDRAW).
I have no desire to work on a spreadsheet on a phone or a tablet.
I don't see it happening.
Let me rephrase that.
I don't see it happening until handheld devices can project a high-def image directly onto the user's retina, or into the user's visual cortex.
At that point, the PC - as we presently know it - will become obsolete.
One of the things that they do so wrong is in their slipshod work allowing things to [basically] be beta-tested as a finished product, making them usable w/ SP1. I would love it if they were to [internally] adopt a language designed to catch errors earlier (like Ada).
I have nothing to worry about because I work on the server side of IT, always have. Nobody is going to replace the UNIX and Windows servers where I work anytime soon. As for the client side - browswers, tablest i-phones - I do not care.
We no longer issue laptops to our sales people. They now get iPads. They weren’t using the laptops like we hoped - pulling up online catalogs, downloading customer art files, emailing orders, etc. - because they claimed it was too cumbersome. Instead they wrote down everything and waited until they got back to the office to enter it in the system. This created errors, delayed orders and led to more confusion.
Now they use the QuickBooks mobile app to instantly enter estimates/orders. They can quickly find products, get instant accurate pricing, and even order the products themselves from the field. Much fewer mistakes, much faster order processing.
We still need full PC’s - Macs and Windows-based - for artwork creation and accounting, but the days of we’ve-hired -an-employee-order-a-new-computer are gone. So is the day spent loading software and configuring the system. We can configure the iPads in less than an hour. Additionally, the laptops were always breaking down and/or getting malware and viruses. We have had zero mechanical problems with the iPads and no virus/malware issues.
Microsoft will become like IBM - a mere ghost of it’s former self.
Step 1: Write a word processing app that works.
Waaaaay too hard for the Microshaft mentality!
That's probably viable for a minority of people (like those whose only use of a PC is for email, for example), but you also have the factor that there haven't been any new compelling but hardware-hungry apps driving turnover in hardware with associated OS purchases.
Really? I found it (Visual Studio's IDE) to be kinda a PITA; I'd rather use the old Borland Delphi 5 IDE though it's starting to show its age it's really quite well-built. -- Though I have to say the worst thing about VS is the help-system, IMO it's a terrible internet integration. {The old .hlp files were much faster and usually easier to navigate.}
Apple or Google can and probably have.
The resistance is the enterprise risk in converting to them.
To implement for example, the enterprise would have to test all it's monthly reporting on the new spreadsheet; report the faults and get tech support to fix the problems.
Why make the effort? Change is risk.
You're probably right -- though I got to say that at least COBOL seems to be a fairly stable system. [The last time there was a big COBOL mess it was the Y2K bug, and that was addressed.] Given that it's on the big mainframe as the back-end to a lot of transactions it'd have a lot of pressure to be stable whereas the desktop arena seems to have a surprisingly high tolerance for bad/broken software.
“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.”
Amen to that
Perhaps I am old school, I am, for sure, old, but I don’t see myself ever replacing my full size screen, full size keyboard and mouse for a much smaller screen, impossible to use teeny, tiny keyboard, and finger swipes. Just doesn’t make sense to me. Does it to you?
Funny sight: Folks carrying their phones in their hand as they walk around a store has always amused me. Put it in your pocket! The other day I was in Wal*Mart. A young lady was pushing her buggy down the aisle. She had her phone in her hand. And she had it in a death grip. The muscles and tendons were standing out on her forearm. What’s wrong with people? Have phones become the new security blanket? If so, I feel sorry for you. Worshiping an inanimate object.
LOL on your phone comments.
I see this all the time, especially in the under 30 crowd.
When my family tribe convenes, my wife forces them all to put their phones in a remote location.
“I have no desire to work on a spreadsheet on a phone or a tablet.”
Agreed. And I’m sure traders and analysts at brokerage firms have no desire to run their high end trader workstations and large spreadsheet models on them either, unless they enjoy typing with their pinkies and getting stiff necks.
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