About a year ago, those toting tablets and smartphones only were about 50%.
Well, I had a meeting last week and not a single person brought their laptop to the meeting. Everybody was on tablets and smartphones and none of them were running Windows. It was either iOS or Android. Bringing laptops to the conference table now appears to be a thing of the past.
In a similar vein, nobody seems to use desktops at my work anymore. Laptops rule the cubicles these days and they go home with the employees at night. Laptops are the new desktops and as BYOD takes hold, more and more MacBook Pros are showing up in the workplace. For portability, people are using tablets and smartphones.
Microsoft still has huge market share but they need to be worried. That's probably why Steve Ballmer got kicked to the curb. They need to make changes and they need to make them fast.
Exactly.
This is a perfectly sane move. They NEED to control manufacture of the smallest devices, the phones. They will never succeed in making a pleasant interface unless they do it like Apple does.
This does not need to have ANY bearing on their desktop OS. There still must be, somewhere, an OS that works with diverse hardware and software. One that is the defacto standard for development. The one that can have anything plugged into it and have drivers and software that can handle anything.
In that vein, the desktop and laptop doing “general” computing must always be with us or there’s no way to create the other platforms we use (like the phone).
So let us not get all crazy about it. It’s like the desktop. The concept of the modular computer will not go anywhere. Sometimes you need to BUILD or CONFIGURE a system for a certain task. Nothing else will do. It may become a niche market but it will always exist... for the forseeable future anyway.
My experience as well.