back to article 'It's not a post-PC world: Just a post Windows one, maybe'

Channel watchers Canalys celebrated the launch of Windows 8 this month by declaring we are now in the "post Windows" era. Canalys CEO Steve Brazier kicked off the Channels Forum conference with a state of the industry keynote which questioned how much success Redmond could expect on the back of the Win8 launch, particularly as …

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    1. pixl97

      Re: Meh...

      Which is true with the corollary 'Microsoft's downfall will be with the data'. Once you learn how to store data in a manner that's not microsoft concentric you can then present the data in any number of ways. It doesn't matter if you're a Windows house with SQL server and MS everything, when your data can be opened with a web browser, an iOS app, or a Windows program, you and your customers have another degree of freedom.

  1. ben_myers
    Pirate

    If it's post-Windows, Microsoft has only itself to blame!

    I have been a reseller of Micrsoft products for many years, of necessity, but not because I make any money selling their stuff. Microsoft has not exactly made friends its of distributors, smaller system builders, and resellers. My price from my distributor for any Microsoft product is a percent or two less than the retail selling price. In turn, my distributor pays Micrsoft a couple of percent less than he sells it for. Talk about a dis-incentive! Microsoft products are must-sells at near zero margins.

    I can make very nice margins on the hardware, but when it comes to the software I have no room real to mark it up. Why should my customer pay me $400 for a copy of Office Professional, for example, when he can buy it for $350 in the big box store and install it in minutes? So I "sell" Open Office when I can and I can also sell refurbished computers with the official Windows stickers already on them. If I could convince people to run one of the ten thousand Linux distros, I would. But the Linux crowd shoots itself in the foot with too many distros that look way different than one another, several different UIs on top of naked command Linux, and childish names for programs like Konqueror, KAddressBook, and Kontact, which everyone thinks is oh, so cute!

  2. Sirius Lee

    Very prosaic reason for keeping Windows

    Android, iOS versions are all flavors of unix/linux. Why does that matter? Because these OSs assume that when it is upgraded software developers will *recompile* their code it make it work with the revised API. This is the reason for the recent spat between Miguel de Icaza (Gnome) and Linus Torvalds. Icaza was bemoaning that Gnome must be recompiled for every new version, that the burden is on every developer to maintain multiple versions of their software so patches can be applied to Gnome running on multiple versions of Linux.

    Microsoft has taken that burden. Window 95 code will run on Windows 7 x64. OK, no one is doing that but it a measure of the commitment made by Microsoft. And this has real value in the Enterprise. Can you imagine the hit to productivity and stability if all corporate applications had to be recompiled.

    Android's solution is to make everyone write Java which removes the developer from the underlying OS. Apple have a stable API for the iPhone and in the early days it was in the contract that no functions other than the permitted subset would be used. Portable Linux applications need to be written in Java or Python or some other interpreted virtual machine or they are unlikely to survive the next Linux kernel update.

    So Windows will be around for a long time because there is a real cost benefit. When Apple and Google take backward compatibility seriously then maybe Enterprises will begin to replace Windows.

  3. sambob223
    WTF?

    Microsoft has made life harder for itself, Brazier added, by developing its own hardware and selling through its own shopfronts.

    "If it's an experiment, it's a very strange one."

    By launching its own devices, Microsoft might be taking on Google, he said - but Google doesn't have the sort of ecosystem Microsoft has built over the last 25 years.

    "If they really think they're going to shift a lot of products through their own websites and stores ... they're not going to sell very much," commented the Canalys chief.

    REALLY....yeah because we all know how Apple Is on the verge of bankruptcy doing just that!

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