[TheOtherHobbes]

Unfortunately for the coherency of that argument, the same point applies to MS itself.

Microsoft is under no obligation to cater to the needs of any customers whatsoever.

Which is fine. MS can shoot itself in the head if it wants to.

But there will be consequences for the company.

[pjmlp]

I have been developing for Windows since the 3.1 days.

Every year is the desktop year of something. Meanwhile I got fed up to keep trying to run GNU/Linux on my laptops.

Even the Asus Netbook I bought with Ubuntu support out of the box had wlan issues that took around 6 months to get sorted out.

People keep complaining, but the desktop market hardly changes.

Now the lower margins hybrid tablets/laptops is flooded with 2GB/32GB eMMC Windows 10 netbooks.

[Silhouette]

People keep complaining, but the desktop market hardly changes.

Exactly. The desktop/laptop market has been stagnating for some time. That's partly because the average hardware in those categories reached the point of being good enough for the average user. Personally, I think it's also partly because much of the PC software industry has been stuck in a rut for the past few years. Overall, for most users, the platform simply hasn't offered anything new that they couldn't already do with their 5+ year old gear.

In areas that do benefit substantially from newer hardware, like gaming or CAD or multimedia creative tools, the traditional PC has still been doing pretty well. There have been a lot of significant advances in areas like SSDs, graphics cards and monitors. There have been lots of advances in smaller, low-energy versions of relatively powerful components that have enabled high-end laptops to do things only chunky desktop workstations could do a few years ago. But these areas are only relatively small parts of the overall PC/laptop sector.

Meanwhile, entire sectors like smartphones, tablets and web apps have taken off like a rocket, by providing hardware that supports new and very different use cases, software that takes advantage of those new opportunities and, almost as importantly I suspect, software that typically is cheap and "just works".

Microsoft had well over a decade of almost totally unchallenged market dominance to figure out user-friendly installation, maintenance, removal and security/sandboxing of applications on Windows, and it rearranged the deck chairs a bit here and there. Apple came along with iPhones, almost one-touch installation from an app store and a [dumbed down|simplified] interface that anyone could use effectively, and they became the biggest company in tech in a fraction of that time.

What concerns me most about Microsoft's current direction is that they seem so determined to chase the cheap/easy sector and alternative revenue sources, which have been so effective for the likes of Apple and Google, that they're losing the default powerful/flexible platform that they've provided for the past two decades in the process, effectively stepping a long way backwards in that sector. The trouble is, because Microsoft have been so dominant in that sector for so long, where do those who still value that power and flexibility go instead, even if they are willing to pay a premium to get it?

[pjmlp]

It will happen just with any other market before, after reaching a certain plateau, only a niche will care about.

How many people do actually tune their cars, specially modern ones that require all sorts of on-bord computers?

Or customize their VCRs, TVs and so on?

PC have become what every other home computer system already was, plain appliances.

Before the PC all other home computer systems had all their OS, or at least part of it in ROM and where mostly only expandable via external devices on their connection port, very few models had internal expansion bays.

The market has come to realize that the PC flexibilty doesn't pay any more in the age of "good enough hardware" and razor thing margins, so back to the old appliance model.

As for alternative OS, Apple isn't an alternative in the majority of the world. On my home country people earn on average 500 euros, only the upper layer can afford Apple computers.

ChromeOS is hardly practical, and never saw anyone using one in Europe. Just a few shops in Germany trying to get rid of them at any price.

Android might be a solution, but it remains to be seen how the desktop version of Android N really works out in the wild.

As for GNU/Linux systems, I stop considering them as I am yet to see the typical stores that average people go to buy computers invest in a proper packaged whole stack experience.

So this leaves us with Windows, bad or not, that the majority of people already know.