That will never happen to phones, right?
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In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista…
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I worked with one of those in the mid-to-late 1980ies, we had one in the surveyors department at uni for fieldwork. Not a bad machine for the time.
Found a book with BASIC programs while pruning the bookshelves last year and gave it to an ex-fellow student who still owns a HX-20.
(Hey, is this BB or El Reg ?)
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I believe that is a young Stephen Furst carrying the big bundle of computer and cables…
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Given that it’s BY FAR the most massively installed OS in the world right now, I’d say it’s it’s downright amorous! I’m talking of course about it’s variants like Mac OS, iOS, and especially Android. And TVs and Amazon Echo and routers and…
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So, 2018 will be the year of the Linux desktop?
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I doubt it, although I personally use Ubuntu on about half of the laptops and desktops I use. It’s still pretty clunky compared to other Unix variants like Mac OS though. But Android on the other hand passed Windows a long time ago:
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Not necessarily! I enjoy using GalliumOS (aka Linux) on my Chromebook, as well as ChromeOS.
If that’s a little too intense, the more popular Crouton supports more brands/models.
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Yeah this is more like Microsoft taking over the cloud computing market which they’re doing a good job of it. It’s just sad that every vendor (Microsoft included) are trying to kill the PC. Like it or not, the PC is what everyone uses whether it’s a phone, a videogame console, or a regular desktop PC. Trying to lock up computing behind some approved interface is a crappy way of doing things and I really wish vendors would get over their fantasies of wall gardens. Walled gardens are expensive, crappy, and usually boring places. How about they just let people do and go where they may with their devices instead?
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Uh… Bluetooth keyboards?
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Microsoft killed windows though, didn’t they? I don’t think they had this plan for it when win 10 rolled out but due to the telemetry, botched update after botched update and 2 major feature updates every year causing umpteen problems the rollout has been less than stellar. Win 7 share has actually gone up according to that which meant heads must’ve rolled but instead of listening to their customers they’re now effectively abandoning it and given the colossal fuck up of patching win 7 since january it would appear they were actively sabotaging the venerable OS if you didn’t know they’d sacked most of their quality testers.
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Is anyone else driven into a frothing rage by the peculiar use of “experiences” found in such places as a software company declaring a “Experiences & Devices” division? Something about it makes my skin crawl.
That pet peeves aside; I honestly am finding MS’ decline rather depressing, and that’s coming from someone who was never exactly an enthusiast.
‘Classic’ Microsoft was less tasteful than Apple(though substantially more accessible); and was perfectly willing to be a dick when it thought it had the market power to do so; but their heyday was also(in no small part because of their efforts, in some places because of people resisting them as hard as possible) perhaps the high-water mark for general-purpose computers(heavily standardized because all the wintels had to run Windows or they were basically unfit for purpose) running software that was locally functional and, even when the shrinkwrap said ‘licensed not sold’, yours until you decided to upgrade.
Microsoft was sort of the IBM Lite of personal computers; and so hardly a sympathetic figure; but their decline isn’t primarily about a competitor doing what they did better, or cheaper, or with more software freedom, or any combination of those things: it’s about the entire PC market as we used to know it foundering in a sea of cryptographically crippled consumption appliances (and even the ones without locked bootloaders tend to be such a moving target that you are lucky to have a port available; much less be able to install from the same media on a wide selection of them) and ‘cloud’ subscription and surveillance services.
I don’t look back fondly on Microsoft’s old days because Microsoft was any good; but because those were the days when cuecats were a crude laughingstock, with ambitions of precise consumer surveillance stymied by being clumsy nonsense; not the days of everybody and their competitor having a voice assistant that is basically the apotheosis of the cuecat with text to speech capabilities.
Microsoft’s offerings were not the best way to experience that time(expect for Wintendo purposes, that was pretty fun); but the changes that caught them off guard have substantially been grim and sad(though admittedly with higher spec numbers for lower prices); and whether they succumb or succeed in embracing these trends themselves(Cortana knows they are certainly trying…) it won’t be a pleasant change.
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All good points and I largely agree, but I think most computers even in the era you’re describing were used primarily for consumption anyway. The people who were actually creating things on their desktops or laptops then are probably still using laptops and desktops for creation. That’s my suspicion at least.
And the fact that modern computers (phones, tablets, etc) work so much better now has to be taken into account when comparing eras. The massive amounts of collaboration that modern gizmos have enabled is pretty damn cool, in my opinion at least, and we’re just at the start of it.
And as far as my personal experiences go, 10 years ago I made my living fixing computers for small businesses and at people’s homes, and it was kind of amazing that the average non techy person could use a Windows computer for anything at all, much less actually creating things. Most people were lucky if they could simply handle email and some light word processing. So personally I’d argue that our relationship to computers as a society is massively better now than it was in the heyday of the desktop.
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That’s not just an experience; that’s a premium immersive rich content experience.
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What I find really interesting about this transition is the offloading of both data storage and certain processing to remote servers. Exactly what the “personal computer” was supposed to democratize and eliminate (and did for about 30 years). I’m not editorializing here; the computer as a terminal was then and is now the appropriate implementation for the most part. It’s just a really interesting circuit.
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Umm 90% of Windows 10 PCs have the Fall Creator’s Update. There were some hitches in the rollout of the Anniversary Update and some of the subsequent updates were rolled out a little slower but they’re firing on all cylinders now.
