[dijit]

Think of it in the inverse.

If you're a person who is at one end of a funnel (in this case; new tech companies) and you see a 100% adoption which is contrary to the mainstream: you would think you have good insight.

You might forget that you're looking at:

A) A cargo culture

B) a homogeneous cohort.

This is the same way that people knew ahead of time that Microsoft Office would kill off Lotus notes. Since all school's were transitioning (or had transitioned) to Microsofts products.

It's also why people knew AWS would be so popular ahead of time, because new tech companies were not renting compute anymore, they were passing their credit cards to Amazon - even causing some companies to bet their products on making tooling to make AWS easier.

If you're at one end of the funnel, you can see the future.

Was this the future? or was it a false positive based on a cohort? - I definitely think the market dominance of Windows on the Desktop has been thoroughly challenged since 2008, and it's rare I see people elect to use Windows for <10yo companies unless the founders are only used to Microsoft products.

and I work in AAA games, which is insanely Microsoft dominated.

[jvanderbot]

So you're saying that new AAA game companies use macs or linux?

I can't resolve the cognitive dissonance of that making a ton of sense or none.

[dijit]

There are more non-windows PC's in AAA game companies than there were in 2008 by a wide margin. Though usually not directly for gamedev.

In 2008, the IT department couldn't even handle Macs at all, now it's a standard deployment among managers, designers, brand and even some programmers who only work with backend code. (though usually they'll have a gaming PC too for testing the game).

That was literally unthinkable back then.

[CrimsonCape]

Sure there are more non-windows PC's but it's still miniscule[1]. To claim Microsoft is anything other than dominant is fallacious. And I understand the desire to talk positively about the good things (linux adoption) and ignore the bad things (Microsoft dominance).

[1] "https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/linux-share-on-steam-b...

[dijit]

The amount of steam users is not at all what I’m talking about, I’m saying as a game developer (a windows *dominated* field) there are more people running around with Macs for general purpose computing than 2008.

That’s not wishful thinking, thats reality. Computers do more than play games.