The CPUs are 1000's of times faster, we have 1000x the RAM, 1000x the disk speed and capacity.
And yet, despite the fancier graphics and drop shadows and animated menus, other than raw number-crunching, we are not much more productive, overall.
Last weekend I spent 2 hours fighting with a stupid problem, that kept me from doing 5 minutes work, that in the past would have taken me 15 minutes but wouldn't have cost me the 2 hours. Where's the improvement?
Nadella is keeping Microsoft alive, and for that we are thankful -- we all need Microsoft to stay active in the marketplace, to some extent or another. And he's steering the company in a useful direction, for the sake of the stockholders (that's his primary responsibility), and he's doing a good job.
Microsoft's relevance, however, is increasingly debatable. They lost their way with Windows 8, and they have yet to find their place in the rapidly-evolving modern techno-cultural landscape.
Windows 10, for all its good points, is a solution in search of a problem. It's faster and more secure, but in terms of the user, it doesn't do anything useful or good that Windows 7 didn't already do. Visually, it's just embarrassing. The tech world today moves faster than Microsoft's focus groups can grasp, much less respond to.
Nearly all the Windows users I know, at work and privately, on this forum and others, were perfectly content with Windows 7 (and many with XP). They hated Windows 8, for good reason. Microsoft could have produced Windows 10 with a Classic Windows theme, and people would have been thrilled. Instead they stuck with the Windows 8 theme (slightly improved).
Nadella will take Windows into "the cloud", and it will just be another cloud-app "platform" like ChromeOS, and perhaps that's Microsoft's destiny.
But I remember the Good Ol' Days...
I did have a typo in my last post... the first XT clone I built and still own, had an Intel 8086 processor with 29,000 transistors running at 4.77 MHz. This was 879 transistors per square millimeter. This was an incredible accomplishment. Intel processors these days have up to 2 to 3 Billion transistors and run at variable speeds up to 5 GHz. This is over 20,000,000 transistors per square millimeter, nearly 23,000 times the density. The new processors have multiple cores, built in GPUs, cache memory, and many other support features.
To me it feels like this massive amount of capability has been largely squandered as far as productivity goes. Our cell phones... in some cases our watches have far more capability than desktop computers of old. The massive increase in processing capability in desktops, laptops, tablets, phones and other devices has been mostly used for entertainment purposes.
I personally feel threatened by “cloud” services. I use them for sharing photos etc... but the security issues of having all of your files and info backed up in the cloud is prohibitive for me.
I currently have a large collection of vintage computers. But we are moving soon, so I will be getting rid of most of it.