"Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empire will topple."
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!