I have a co-worker that was all about the PC. We would have battles and debates regarding quality, etc. Ironically, he has a Mac Pro, iMacs and iPhones. He actually put a large investment into apple shares as well. I finally asked him why he switched because he was so anti-mac. His #1 reason he said "Mac just gets it". He says apple is one of the most stable tech companies in the world today. They have enough reserve capital to buy out 4 leading internet companies. He also said that a mac can be relevant for 3-4 years. He said all his PCs don't even come close. And to back his claim. I still own a Mac tower I purchased 6 years ago and is still blazing fast. Of course I bought the top of the line then; but in comparison, I saved in the long run.
Constant software updating? I think I spend 2 minutes every six months or so updating the latest iTunes software. My 7 year old can put songs on her iPod shuffle with her eyes closed. I actually sync my phone thru wifi and don't even plug it in anymore. Couldn't be easier... AND I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT COMPUTERS!
Yeah and I love how you take a photo and it's on my iPhone, computer and iPads instantly. And when I purchase a song, they are downloaded to all the ipads, cpu's, iphones and iMovie. The only manual thing I do is turn my stereo on and use my iMovie remote.
mainly using it for emailing on the road + evernote. i could wait forever but i need something with a bluetooth keyboard so i don't have to carry my laptop when i travel.
Companies are born, companies die. And the more dynamic the industry, the shorter the lifespan of companies are. If Microsoft dies, its knowledge will live on in hundreds or thousands of new companies created by its former employees.
Just curious how microsoft can die? I mean seriously look at their PC marketshare. It would be quite the feat and would still take quite some time.
I've been toying around with getting an ipad or ipad mini this week. decided against it for the time being and just use my laptop. might get that galaxy note 2 phone though. shit is huge. I'd probably use it way more too. I've had family members using the windows phones but they're too limited with crap, you don't have the real apps on them. that's the main selling point for me.
Just got my wife a kick ass refurbished iPad for xmas........ she'll probably use it for reading books more then anything.
The main piece of evidence given in that 4-month-old article is that in a bad economy with customers delaying purchases until Windows 8 is released, PC sales were down 0.1% at the time of the article.
Windows 8 seems like a debacle. I do about 90% of the stuff most corporate users use a PC for--Excel, Access, Powerpoint, Photoshop, InDesign, VisualBasic, Dreamweaver, etc. I can't think of a single one of these programs that would be improved with a touch-screen style interface over a mouse. I've never said to myself, "Why doesn't Microsoft get rid of that annoying Start button?" Truth is that the Windows operating systems prior to 8 were mature and universally understood. It's way, way too late to change everything to try to be competitive in the smartphone/touchpad game. That said, I don't see me trashing the several thousand dollars of software I've accrued to go to Mac, and Google Docs is a joke compared to MS Office when you start getting into advanced features. I'm not planning on building a 50 layer 75 megabyte 15 path photoshop graphic anytime soon through a browser. Windows has a lot of life left in it. Windows 9 will look a lot more like Windows 7, and we'll forget 8 ever happened.
Much ado about nothing. The media has claimed for 10 years that Microsoft is dying. Tempest in a teapot.
Have you used pages and numbers designed by Mac? It's actually a sexy interface and has the ability to do just as much as word and excel. And you can use the license of pc software to upgrade to Mac.
From a technical point - Windows 8 is a great product at an early age (not fully baked). Market perception has not caught up with it - but Microsoft's late entry into the touch market might actually be a blessing in the long run. We basically have 2 markets here that are interesting - mobile and PC - right now Microsoft is the only company that is trying to combine it - and if they succeed - they will be in a really strong position. Apple has 2 operating systems that are not compatible - MacOS (GUI, powerful computers, flexible, no touch support, no support for mobile chips (ARM vs Intel)) and iOS - mobile only, starting to show it's age (the user-interface did not change much since 2007 - and it still looks like a colorful, touch supported version of the old Palm Pilot interface, limited support for screen resolutions (3 screen resolution, practically, 2 of them (retina 4S and iPad 3+) are the old ones doubled twice (because iOS does not support vector resizing). So basically, they have Mac for notebooks/desktops, iOS for phones/tablets. Google has 2 operating systems that are not compatible - ChromeOS (limited functionality, can run on both Intel/ARM but does not really take advantage of the power on Intel) and no touch support , and Android - Mobile mostly (ARM) but with limited support for Intel X86 low-power chips (mostly, developed by Intel, not Google), better support for multiple resolutions and hardware ecosystem than iOS - but limited mouse and keyboard support. Fragmentation is a real issue. So basically, they have ChromeOS for notebooks/desktops, Android for phones/tablets. Microsoft has 2 operating systems as well going forward, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 - but it seems like Windows Phone 8 is morphing to be a Windows 8 on small devices with time - as they both share the same kernel and graphics engine and user-interface (tiles, directX, WinRT). Microsoft is the only company that has touch supported in all environments - and support ARM and X86 on their "main" OS - Windows 8, with the largest and most consistent hardware ecosystem, and while they are playing catchup with the software ecosystem for the new Apps (Metro, nee Windows Store Apps) - they also have the largest software eco-system if you consider the more than billion Windows desktop Apps. FWIW - I work as a software developer, our apps are available on most of these systems, we have a Windows desktop app (our main money maker) but we also have a couple of popular Chrome OS Apps (which can also be deployed to the Mac, thus no native Mac app), several Android apps and one iOS App. We started researching Windows 8 Metro now (Windows Store App) - and honestly, from a technical point of view, there is no doubt - Windows 8 has the best software architecture for developers, it is the most modern, supports more languages, better libraries and better enterprise level support built in than any of the others. There are some issues with Windows 8, and some baffling decisions, but I suspect that they will solve them rather quickly - and in the long term, you will start seeing stuff on Windows 8 which are really hard to get to do on the other architectures. I do not know if this is going to translate to market success - but I think it is very premature to count Microsoft out.
I think for microsoft to come out on top; they need to get into hardware. Samsung has google as their software partner and apple makes both software and hardware. The microsoft phone is weak in comparrison of the apple and samsung phones.
Another point that is important, Microsoft is the only company that has compatible API and infrastructure for front-end and server computing, which is great for developers. Microsoft has actually been growing on the server side, it is just the consumer side that they had problems with lately. FWIW - you have 3 or 4 big general purpose providers for server side development - 1. Amazon (The biggest cloud side development infrastructure, and maybe the best overall at this point with support for databases (SimpleDB, DynamoDB), storage (S3) and execution (EC2). They have no presence however in server rooms, it is all in the cloud. 2. Microsoft - Support for both classic servers (server rooms) and cloud with Azure. DB (SQL Server), Execution (Windows Server), Clound execution and DB (AZure). 3. Google - Cloud only, very capable, but not as widely used as Amazon. (Google App Engine) 4. Multiple companies offering mix and match based on Unix systems (DB - Oracle, CouchDB, MongoDB, OS - Red Hat) - very capable, but fragmented and a lot of work to get things going. So again, Microsoft is the only company that offers a unified infrastructure for developers all the way from low-power mobile, through powerful personal machines (desktops, notebooks) to server rooms and the cloud. I think that Microsoft is not going to go anywhere for a very long long run. Even if they completly fail on the consumer side, they are so strong on the back-end (server) that they are going to be huge going forward for many many years. If on the other hand they manage to execute on their unified vision, there is only one company that might be able to stop them - and that's Google. No-one else comes close.
Samsung is an OEM for both Google and Microsoft. They make tons of Microsoft hardware as well, from Notebooks, Desktops, Tablets and Phones. Their huge buiild up success was mostly seen on the Android and iOS side because the old Windows side has entrenched players (HP, Lenovo, Dell) - which were slow to move into mobile, but one suspects that as soon Windows 8 becomes more successful (and it will be successful, even if it "fails" like Vista, that still means 300 million copies) - Samsung will spend more time on their hardware. For all practical purposes, Nokia is a Microsoft puppet nowadays - so they have hardware there, and they started getting into hardware more seriously (they were in hardware for many years with keyboards, mice, web cams, xbox) with the Surface, one suspects that when the Surface Pro comes out - you will see a lot more of their hardware around. I still say, Microsoft is very far from going anywhere.
