Windows hit its lowest market share in decades, Microsoft lost $400 billion in a week, and now their own president is admitting they need to fix the OS. SteamOS and Linux aren’t waiting around.
Windows hit its lowest market share in decades, Microsoft lost $400 billion in a week, and now their own president is admitting they need to fix the OS. SteamOS and Linux aren’t waiting around.
So, I can believe Windows is falling apart; I’m less sure of real indications that “Microsoft is panicking” though. I think the newest pie charts I saw of their revenue showed they weren’t really so specifically dependent on Windows. It helps to sell their other cloud platforms, sure, but it doesn’t seem so critical they sell home PCs anymore. Maybe I could be wrong and someone can correct me.
Don’t get me wrong, I moved my gaming PC off Windows late last year, I’m happy to end the toxic relationship, just predicting what’s going to happen next.
Their direct Revenue from Windows is not a main concern since I think it was something like 20% as you said. The problem though is that their cloud and enterprise offerings rely on the fact that businesses buy into the Windows platform.
Absolute garbage tier software like Teams, modern O365, AD, Azure, etc only sells because its built on Windows. If MSFT loses the home market, businesses have a high chance of following, especially since their QA process relies exclusively on home users.
Companies like RedHat and OpenSUSE already provide such services and plenty of smaller or newer clients have trialed or switched user-end desktop machines over to linux.
All they really need is to reach maybe 10% desktop market share, and MSFT would start facing a slaughter in the coming years as big OEMs start shipping linux from factory.
Anyone who isn’t heavily vendor locked would probably take the chance, especially if they don’t even rely on any Windows specific functionality for work.
But yeah as you said, good riddance. Windows has been such a trash experience for me ever since 8. They ignored all the critical issues and complaints on the stupid insider hub, and then doubled down on ruining the OS further in 10 and 11.
I think they are panicking because of the stock price reaction.