| General > General Technical Chat |
| Bill Gates leaves MS board |
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| Karel:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/what_s-your-main-operating-system/ |
| golden_labels:
With Windows Microsoft was caught in the trap of misunderstanding that software development is not like any other industry. Pieces of software do not wear out if you use them a lot, so there is no demand driven by the need for replacement or repair(1). Once a given problem is properly solved in software, there is very little room for further improvement (compared to other industries) and if any occurs it’s rarely perceived by the customer as worth paying for. You can’t sell a copy of an operating system and hope the user will come to you after 3 years to get a new version: it doesn’t have 2× larger image sensor, it’s not 2× faster, it doesn’t come packed with three times more features, it’s not half as cheap to run. As long as there are some things you didn’t solved in your product, you may expect demand, but later you end up with a product you must maintain indefinitely despite no one wants to pay for it anymore. With hope that perhaps technological progress will create new problems to solve, and forcing the customers to pay by preventing them from getting updates for older versions.(2) Companies like Microsoft are built on the belief many early programmers had: that software development is not different than other industries, but they can develop a product once and then forever profit from it with little effort. Reality has shown that that effort is far from being small, but at the time no one knew this. But software development is different. Some of the differences were patched using state interventionism and creating the artificial market. Some other issues were addressed by practices like cutting users off from updates, intentionally introducing icompatibilities, damaging official documentation, producing problem to solve etc. But one can’t make money forever by going against reality. Though I would be happy to see the world without Microsoft, I doubt there are any reasons to think they will fall anytime soon. The company may simply do what they were always doing: buy a product at bargain price from another company, polish it a bit, rebrand it as their own, sell at much higher price, and if competition comes — just FUD or EEE them. ____ (1) Though Windows is somehow an exception and requires periodic reinstalls or at least heavy renovation. ;) (2) Not to be confused with the general EOL of LTS versions, which is only about platform stability. |
| Zero999:
--- Quote from: Karel on March 20, 2020, 09:49:14 am --- (Attachment Link) https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-developers-primary-operating-systems --- End quote --- --- Quote from: Karel on March 20, 2020, 09:57:30 am --- (Attachment Link) https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/what_s-your-main-operating-system/ --- End quote --- --- Quote from: Karel on March 20, 2020, 09:05:43 am --- --- Quote from: Zero999 on March 19, 2020, 08:03:38 pm ---Quickly Googling shows Linux is just under 1.9% which is tiny, compared to Windows. --- End quote --- Because that number includes houesewives and gamers. In engineering, that number is at least a ten times higher. Even higher in software development. --- End quote --- So, what's your point? I already knew that. Do you really think I didn't come across those statistics during my Google searches? Developers represent only a tiny percentage of the desktop computing market! The only way I can see Linux increasing its desktop market share is by more causal users having their computing needs met more by games consoles, smartphones and tablet devices, than by desktop computers. If the Linux desktop market share increases, it'll be because the total number of desktop computers declines and it will be the Windows users who stop using them, leaving a proportionally higher number of Linux users, rather than more people using Linux. --- Quote from: golden_labels on March 20, 2020, 10:40:52 am ---With Windows Microsoft was caught in the trap of misunderstanding that software development is not like any other industry. Pieces of software do not wear out if you use them a lot, so there is no demand driven by the need for replacement or repair(1). Once a given problem is properly solved in software, there is very little room for further improvement (compared to other industries) and if any occurs it’s rarely perceived by the customer as worth paying for. You can’t sell a copy of an operating system and hope the user will come to you after 3 years to get a new version: it doesn’t have 2× larger image sensor, it’s not 2× faster, it doesn’t come packed with three times more features, it’s not half as cheap to run. As long as there are some things you didn’t solved in your product, you may expect demand, but later you end up with a product you must maintain indefinitely despite no one wants to pay for it anymore. With hope that perhaps technological progress will create new problems to solve, and forcing the customers to pay by preventing them from getting updates for older versions.(2) Companies like Microsoft are built on the belief many early programmers had: that software development is not different than other industries, but they can develop a product once and then forever profit from it with little effort. Reality has shown that that effort is far from being small, but at the time no one knew this. But software development is different. Some of the differences were patched using state interventionism and creating the artificial market. Some other issues were addressed by practices like cutting users off from updates, intentionally introducing icompatibilities, damaging official documentation, producing problem to solve etc. But one can’t make money forever by going against reality. Though I would be happy to see the world without Microsoft, I doubt there are any reasons to think they will fall anytime soon. The company may simply do what they were always doing: buy a product at bargain price from another company, polish it a bit, rebrand it as their own, sell at much higher price, and if competition comes — just FUD or EEE them. ____ (1) Though Windows is somehow an exception and requires periodic reinstalls or at least heavy renovation. ;) (2) Not to be confused with the general EOL of LTS versions, which is only about platform stability. --- End quote --- Software doesn't wear out but hardware does and software will always need to be modified to run on newer hardware. Try installing MS-DOS and 3.1 on a modern machine and using it to post here and watch YouTube. |
| rdl:
It's actually kind of funny, Microsoft generated so much bad press for themselves with the release of Windows 10 that many people were turned against it without ever seeing it or using it. |
| nctnico:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 20, 2020, 11:45:41 am ---Developers represent only a tiny percentage of the desktop computing market! --- End quote --- But developers and engineers (too) run very expensive software and have much larger budgets to spend on software and hardware. That is an interesting market to be in. And if that market starts to shift to a different OS then software and hardware providers have to move along otherwise they are going to lose sales. |
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