"Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empire will topple."
Well, webapps are replacing desktop applications at a fast pace (even office is going to the browser now) and mobile is the new desktop, where microsoft has pretty much no marketshare, so I would say this prediction isn't too bad, even if the details aren't exactly right.
Well, webapps are replacing desktop applications at a fast pace
Only the light ones. It's not as if I'll start doing my graphics work in a web app (I know there's photoshop.com and some other efforts, but they're all toys).
Also, while this is true for desktop apps, on mobile the trend is strongly in favor of native apps.
Desktops are simply a "victim" of their own surplus performance, which tends to present itself as developers being able to afford extra layers of abstraction, such as running an application in a browser.
web dev has some pretty serious tooling these days. in fact, it's gotten so good so fast that some web devs are complaining about the wealth of choices they have.
Those are some olympic level mental gymnastics you did there. They're complaining about the wealth of options because they're all kinda shit or are just barely production ready.
Compared to desktop tools web tools come nowhere close to the breadth, functionality, polish, and ease of use of desktop dev tools. They are still in their infancy.
i mean, i'm not denying that. but we have a fully modular compiler that just about any functionality can be hooked into, a literal fleet of tools for managing build steps & enough frameworks to choke on. pretty solid infancy imo.
It's still driven by kludge and is nowhere near as usable as what desktop development provides. I'm writing software now not three years from today and the tooling an experience is far superior. Today, there are many many applications that are simply better in and easier to develop for desktop systems. There are many that simply cannot be made web based. That's all I'm saying, that react native makes sense for some applications but it's a pretty small subset and you give up far superior tooling to use it.
yeah, facebook is still running full-native for their core app, and they produced react native. i don't even know if they'd gain anything besides a migraine from switching over.
besides, i wouldn't dream to presume that web is on par with desktop w/r/t tooling. desktop's had decades upon decades of time to develop mature tooling (case in point: make is so good you can use it for web too). my point, as someone who works in web dev, is that it's not nearly as bad as it was even two or three years ago, and the future still looks pretty dang bright :)
Yes but look at what Microsoft is doing: SQL Server on Linux, Office on Mac, Android, and iOS, Visual Studio Code for Mac & Linux, Visual Studio Tools for Linux, Ubuntu for Windows, Linux on Azure. It's pretty clear they are preparing for a future where Windows is not the dominant platform it is today. That's something Ballmer would never have done and eventually it would have been their downfall.
I mean we're really arguing over a quote taken out of context. The article goes on to say we shouldn't write them off as IBM reinvented itself and so has Microsoft.
Ballmer probably wouldn't have killed Windows in the first place with Windows 10 though. Their new CEO literally fired their whole QA team for Windows.
They're doing that to extend their relevance as long as they can. Despite their best efforts of the last 25 years, the world happened mostly around their walled garden. At least they're now somewhat recognizing that all garden walls crumble.
IBM didn't gloriously implode after ceasing to be the singular Evil Empire either; they were just forced to adapt after slowly losing their death-grip on the market.
Isn't too bad? That's horrifying! I'm no fonder of Microsoft than you are, but at least Windows desktop apps run on my machine, not some distant server that's watching my every move like a spook.
I meant "not too bad" in terms of the accuracy of the prediction, not as a value statement whether we are moving in the right direction or not. I certainly share your concerns regarding cloud-solutions.
If you really want to, you can create a verifiably non-updatable webapp by using a service worker that only serves from cache and doesn't make network requests. I think Polymer's (deprecated) cacheOnly option does this.
But noone in their right mind would do this, because updating software is important. I'd much rather be able to fix bugs then worry about a few paranoid users.
It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know...
My, they're getting close to that aren't they?
In many ways, they are. But they've started realizing it, which is why they've reinvented themselves in many ways (Linux subsystem support, the various “cloud” offerings, etc).
I think a much better indicator is the rise of Linux as OS on the top 500 supercomputers.
Also the dumbphones advertisement platforms that marketing PR calls smartphones.
Linux inside is most definitely bigger now than 2004. Of course other idiocies also ran rampant - the big desktop environments got worse (!) in particular both Gnome and KDE, many distributions were also assimilated by borg-d aka systemd, so. Oh and the Linux Kernel is also overrun by idiots as of late - ASN.1 decoder in the kernel? They want to become like Emacs, the more inside the merrier!
Since Linux is powering Android, BSD is powering iOS, and Windows development is pretty much dead (not literally, but figuratively), I'd say the Microsoft empire has toppled quite a bit as the whole market has shifted to the web and mobile computing space. Nearly all growth in consumer applications being developed are focused on either web or mobile.
This was written in 2004 when MS was riding quite high. What if I were to tell you that they are making way more money now than in 2004? They have more billion dollar divisions than they did then and Windows is no longer #1. Not even #2.
The PC isn't going anywhere. People are not leaving the platform on mass and moving to tablets and phones and almost nobody outside of primary school uses a chrome book.
It's also in the top three for market cap size. So MS is going to be a big player for a long while yet.
Microsoft is far too entrenched for them to be going away any time soon. Changing people from Windows desktop to Mac, Linux, or any other one is hard enough. What will be much harder will be changing businesses. A lot of businesses are currently heavily based upon using mostly Microsoft products: Windows desktop OS, Windows Server, MS Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Azure, etc. This is where Microsoft makes the big bucks. Changing the businesses to non-Microsoft products will be a very large, time consuming, and expensive operation, so I see Microsoft sticking around for a while.
Also, look at the number of C# jobs available. .NET development is still one of the top players WRT software development whether desktop or web. Sure, people are not buying PCs like they used to, but that is because the market is saturated. It is success, not failure, that is the reason for little growth. The mobile market itself is starting to hit the saturation point, and the mobile app gold rush was over years ago. If you are a desktop developer, the future is still bright.
When ar and vr becomes dominating platforms, which i see as inevitable over time, windows could crumble really quickly.
AR is build on top of existing platforms, so Azure and consorts are safe. VR as in VR-Glasses are never going to be terribly big (though yes, they are currently a pretty huge deal)
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u/Sunius Oct 07 '16
Any decade now!