Microsoft obsolete by 2017

[Mr. Gibs]

Second, I didn't speak of Google's commitment to Webkit, I was talking about that for the web it would be better if browser vendors all came under one roof with rendering engine so we can move innovation forward and have less problems with fragmentation.

I believe you were also completely adamant that it was so great that Google used webkit and if everyone used it too there would be no forks, no fragmentation etc even though I and about a billion other people warned you that you were wrong. And then a few days ago Google forks Webkit to make Blink.

When HTML5 released and Apple were pushing it heavily you said several times that HTML5 was the worth thing to happen to technology and everyone should just stop bothering to use it and use flash instead. But if the article is about how poor MS' HTML5 standards are then you get all gleefully happy and claim that everyone should use Chrome because it has the best HTML5 support.

Your opinion on standards flips flops more than Romney and as long as Google does it you'll support it, but if anyone else does it then they're wrong.

[Buio]

Microsoft isn't going obsolete by 2017, but they have lost a huge amount of importance already.

[PGHammer]

Completely agree with what your saying - im just not sure if that's in support of MS having problems of loosing their market share or not. If I use your own words and my suspicion that the current economic situation seems to be getting worse rather than better. I would say that by 2017 there won't have been a big enough recovery (if any) and customers not wanting "change" due to costs will more than likely still be running MS applications and services which would say you are against the articles views?

However you could also argue if switching to a google service or UNIX etc would in the long run save you money - then more people will do it.

Microsoft's market share is under pressure merely by mobile replacing portable (not desktops, but laptops and notebooks), even SurfaceRT doesn't bend the cost curve down as much as inexpensive (and largely horrible in quality) sub-$200USD Android tablets, slates, and Chromebooks do. And that is the CONSUMER space. In the business space, instead, businesses are pushing hardware upgrades off AND avoiding spending on training - Windows 7 lets them do both; while Windows 8 does NOT require new hardware, the training still is needed, and that is where the cutbacks are coming from.

The only way that a Google service OR UNIX OR a Linux distribution can save money is IF the cost is below that of the Microsoft equivalent AND training costs are the same or lower - if the service or application were even free, but you spend far more on training to use the new software, that is BAD for business, and worse than staying put. (That is why some early adopters of Google Apps/Docs got blindsided - the retraining costs outweighed the per-seat savings of Google vs. Office. The same thing applies to government/NGO usage - if the training costs are too high, staying put makes more sense.)

I get those avoiding upgrading for reasons of cost - that actually makes sense. It's the non-cost/price related reasons that usually don't.

[Morphine-X]

I'll just quote this comment from that article

Lets not forget that if you register on one of any Google product websites (ie: google+, youtube) it auto registers you a gmail account and vice versa in any of their products. Not bashing Google in anyway by saying this but its another way for them to skew numbers in their favor across the board.

[PGHammer]

Lets not forget that if you register on one of any Google product websites (ie: google+, youtube) it auto registers you a gmail account and vice versa in any of their products. Not bashing Google in anyway by saying this but its another way for them to skew numbers in their favor across the board.

Yup - I shudder how many time I'm *counted* when logging in to ANY of Google's services - and the only Android device I actually *own* is my BlueStacks VM (which I run in Windows 8 Pro x64, by the by) - even in Google Chrome (same OS), it says I'm running a T-Mobile Android phone (albeit a moldie-oldie running Froyo), and I've NEVER been a T-M subscriber (while my old-school Samsung candybar phone DOES use T-M towers, it is utterly Web-incapable, and I've never used it for e-mail). While I am a *charter* GMail subscriber, the e-mail client of choice that I use is (chortling) *Outlook*.

[Shadrack]

Microsoft should be getting increasingly concerned with the shift to gaming on mobile platforms, no doubt about it.. and the lack of reliance on Windows generally. But I just can't see one of the worlds largest software companies, whose Windows OS powers the majority of home PC's, and whose gaming console is in millions of homes suddenly becoming obsolete within 4 years.

What about enterprise users, for example? What about Office? There is no real replacement for Windows at work, nor is there any *real* competition for Office still. Or Exchange.

Exactly. Enterprise is a HUGE market which Microsoft still has a stranglehold on with no competition in sight. 4 years? Pleeeaasee...Click-fest journalism at its best.

[Boz]

I believe you were also completely adamant that it was so great that Google used webkit and if everyone used it too there would be no forks, no fragmentation etc even though I and about a billion other people warned you that you were wrong.

Absolutely, I was saying that would be good for the web.. but that's obviously what they don't want to do (so it was a pipe dream as well).. they have done the worst possible thing they could have done.. both Mozilla and Google are creating new rendering engines.. Making forks with new rendering engines is a terrible terrible idea. Now people will have to test with Gecko, Servo, Blink, Webkit, IE etc.. it will be worse than it ever was.

Fragmentation of the web and "This works only with this engine or browser" will now be even worse. Hell Google themselves even admit it that this will cause setback to the web from their blog.

The point is that they are all driven by power and control of the web. Mozilla, Google, Microsoft they all want to control the web with their own browser and that's why web will always suck when it comes to ubiquity. Believing that somehow because of a standard this will all work great is a pipe dream as we have had standards for a while now and we saw how that worked out, thus why I said that best thing for the web would be to create a single rendering engine that all of these companies would contribute too (it seemed that webkit could have been that one, but now it's obvious that nobody has interest in actually making the web more unified but are driven by their own politics and desire to control it)

[Boz]

When HTML5 released and Apple were pushing it heavily you said several times that HTML5 was the worth thing to happen to technology and everyone should just stop bothering to use it and use flash instead.

That's absolutely not what I said.. stop paraphrasing and imagining things.. I can't go into this again.... I said that HTML5 sucks because it's nowhere near rich interactivity as Flash is and AS3 is far better than JS and tools are much better and it just works no matter what browser and how ubiquity being promised with HTML5 is a pipe dream as long as we don't have a unified web platform like Flash is.

I constantly said that HTML5 is a major improvement over older HTML and it's good that is finally evolving but that it's a mess. 5 years in and still is. The only real consistent element you can use is canvas and even with that in some cases you have to use many poly-fills to patch up it's mess.

And btw, Apple is the WORST HTML5 supporter out of everyone. Safari supports least amount of HTML5 APIs out of all of them.. so ironic considering they were the ones complaining about Flash and saying how HTML5 is the future. They suck the most.

[justmike]

Many people may be using their existing hardware now, because it is not broken. Do you really think people will buy a more costly laptop over a far more portable tablet that will do the same things? The gamers, and a select few others will be the only ones needing more powerful devices at some point. That also will go away once Cloud and streaming services are more realized. It's not an accident that MS is focusing on cloud services security. They have another situation with the Xbox. Your PS4 from another device? No problem. If the next Xbox is not two generations higher in graphics performance than the PS4 (you can lookup the equivalent PS4 power with an existing gfx chip), they may as well start waving the white flag on that also.

[HSoft]

Google has Microsoft beat in Email, Browser, Mobile and Tablet OS, Search, Maps all of which are primary applications consumer use.

I haven't seen anything that Microsoft does that is way better than Google.

not to mention, Software has become commoditized, that certainly does have a negative effect on largest software maker.

mmm....must be quite sheltered then.

Exchange is used by a tonne of companies. Sharepoint is used heavily and its base is growing. Visual Studio is arguably the best development IDE there is etc. etc.

Products that (at present anyway) Google can't compete with.

And lets not forget Office which is (currently) the standard.

[Buio]

...thus why I said that best thing for the web would be to create a single rendering engine that all of these companies would contribute too (it seemed that webkit could have been that one, but now it's obvious that nobody has interest in actually making the web more unified but are driven by their own politics)

I don't see how it could be a problem. FIrefox with gecko is fine compatibility-wise compared to the webkit-based browsers. Too homogeneous is not good either in my opinion.

[siah1214]

Absolutely, I was saying that would be good for the web.. but that's obviously what they don't want to do.. they have done the worst possible thing they could have done.. both Mozilla and Google are creating new rendering engines.. Making forks with new rendering engines is a terrible terrible idea. Now people will have to test with Gecko, Servo, Blink, Webkit, IE etc.. it will be worse than it ever was.

Fragmentation of the web and "This works only with this engine or browser" will now be even worse. Hell Google themselves even admit it that this will cause setback to the web from their blog.

The point is that they are all driven by power and control of the web. Mozilla, Google, Microsoft they all want to control the web with their own browser and that's why web will always suck when it comes to ubiquity. Believing that somehow because of a standard this will all work great is a pipe dream, thus why I said that best thing for the web would be to create a single rendering engine that all of these companies would contribute too (it seemed that webkit could have been that one, but now it's obvious that nobody has interest in actually making the web more unified but are driven by their own politics and desire to control it)

Just want to say that this is the exact opposite of what I expected you to say on this subject, and cheers to you for sticking to your guns :)

[HawkMan]

Absolutely, I was saying that would be good for the web.. but that's obviously what they don't want to do (so it was a pipe dream as well).. they have done the worst possible thing they could have done.. both Mozilla and Google are creating new rendering engines.. Making forks with new rendering engines is a terrible terrible idea. Now people will have to test with Gecko, Servo, Blink, Webkit, IE etc.. it will be worse than it ever was.

Fragmentation of the web and "This works only with this engine or browser" will now be even worse. Hell Google themselves even admit it that this will cause setback to the web from their blog.

The point is that they are all driven by power and control of the web. Mozilla, Google, Microsoft they all want to control the web with their own browser and that's why web will always suck when it comes to ubiquity. Believing that somehow because of a standard this will all work great is a pipe dream as we have had standards for a while now and we saw how that worked out, thus why I said that best thing for the web would be to create a single rendering engine that all of these companies would contribute too (it seemed that webkit could have been that one, but now it's obvious that nobody has interest in actually making the web more unified but are driven by their own politics and desire to control it)

OR people could just follow standards and use the standards method of checking for availability of HTML features.

[Boz]

OR people could just follow standards and use the standards method of checking for availability of HTML features.

Yes.. that would be wonderful.. but again, standards existed before HTML5.. W3C wasn't made just for HTML5 and it didn't work before.. what makes it different now?

The reason why standards don't work over time is because when you have multiple rendering engines and browsers driven by the idea of controlling the web they will always introduce things on top of it to distinguish themselves. So they eventually always add specific APIs that "extend" standards and they find reasons why their way is better so developers would use it as it is easier and then suddenly you have the same problem why standards exist in the first place.

We are already seeing it happening with new APIs like WebRTC and other things that only work with Chrome and possibly Firefox nightlies (they can't even make that work across all browsers and that's a fairly simple thing), desire to control the DRM on the open web, the codecs for videos etc etc..

I would love for you to be right. But I have been around for a long time to know that this is not what it eventually turns out to be because greed and power grab is far more important to these corporations than making a web a better and more unified place. And Mozilla is even worse.. They are ALSO a corporation that lives of off corporate money. They are driven by desire to have their own technology and browser dominant because it ensures their existence. They are still a corporation even though they all sell this "open", "people" approach.

I guess what I'm guilty of is believing that these companies could unity under one rendering engine and contribute with their knowledge and ideas to that one engine and not developing their own.. but I guess that's a pipe dream as well.