The Slow Death of Windows

Windows is dying very slowly and it is still the market leader but it has steadily been losing share for almost 15 years now going down from 95% to the low 60s worldwide meanwhile Mac OS is now stable at over 20% usage share and even Chrome OS and desktop Linux comfortably sit above 3% each worse yet in less price sensitive markets like the US consumer preference for apple is even stronger with well over 30% of consumers Now using a Mac and this whole shift happened while the PC market as a whole has started to decline too apart from a temporary Peak driven by the pandemic era work from home boom sales of PCS have been steadily decreasing since 2011 in other words Microsoft's operating system has a declining share of a declining market so where did they drop the bow and how are they planning to turn things around can the newly announced Snapdragon chip or maybe the big bet on AI really saved them let's find [Music] out this video was sponsored by a mod mic the wireless magnetic microphone to level up your audio in 2010 Steven sinowski then the head of Windows watched Steve Jobs reveal the company's thirdd big product the iPad his initial reaction was confusion as he since admitted on his blog Microsoft leaders did expect to see a tablet at the event but they thought that it would be a Mac OS tablet centered around a digital stylist that cost at least $1,000 similar to a MacBook Air back then the iPad was none of those things which put some serious doubts into Microsoft at the time of this announcement Windows was actually a Better Business than ever due to the successful launch of Windows 7 just Windows alone made over $18 billion in Revenue in 2010 with Incredible operating margins of 70% meaning that it was more profitable than all of Apple combined mind Windows was an incredible profit generating machine at its very Peak but despite this Microsoft felt more unsure about the future of computing and about their role in it than ever the company was clearly losing the smartphone race which threatened to overtake PCS as people's primary Computing platforms while even on PCS the majority of innovative new apps were no longer built around some Windows app framework but rather as web apps running on just about any platform and now here was Apple claiming that the invented the next big form factor as well sinowski in his blog callede this Microsoft's Blackberry moment implying that they were the dinosaurs before the asteroid hit unless they radically reinvented it Windows would just eventually get relegated to the past and given that back then every major Microsoft business from office to MSN and more was tied to windows's success risking that was simply not an option so for the next decade or so Microsoft tried really really hard to to reinvent windows but not only did they fail their attempts to reinvent the wheel actually made things worse creating a pattern of four consistent Steps step one a new technology like the iPad appears that Microsoft things has the potential to become the future of computing step two Microsoft who feels that Windows is falling behind decides to go all in on rebuilding their operating system to compete against this new entrance in the case of the iPad this was done by turning the whole operating system into a quasi tablet interface locking users into full screen apps Etc but then step three the transition actually flops turning a desktop operating system into a tablet one is ultra hard plus Microsoft has to rush this transition and their partners are really slow to adapt Intel never made a chip that could compete on tablets and app developers were really slow to Port their apps over to Microsoft's touch UI too so the whole project just falls apart and meanwhile step four the radical changes actually end up annoying regular Windows users who just want to keep using their PC as a PC so all this new stuff just gets in the way and eventually has to be ripped out of windows again and so at the end of this four-step cycle Microsoft spent years working on something that not only didn't make Windows better on the long term but actually often made it worse afterwards as the big push leaves behind lots of things that eventually become random Legacy bloat I think Windows 8 was kind of the original sin here the first version of this terrible cycle but then for the next decade or so Microsoft kept repeating it again and again here are a few examples step one VR becomes a thing with oculus and HTC VI Microsoft thinks hey this could become a big deal so step two Microsoft goes all in on mixed reality they make Windows 10 able to run a Hol lens a straight up futuristic AR headset and every Windows version on the PC gets a whole mixed reality platform built in you just plug a compatible headset in and it works and not only that Windows itself becomes 3D too paint 3d launchers so users can create and browse 3D objects every office app gets 3D capabilities and even Microsoft's default app framework gets a 3D redesign this means glass-like textures 3D shadows and the glowing cursor similar to how VR controllers highlight where you point to this is because all your desktop apps are supposed to also be rendered in mixed reality as kind of 3D objects too step three Windows mixed reality basically flops I mean personally I thought that their VR headsets worked really great plus the Hol lens is still technically around but the vast majority of the world does not need Windows to be a mixed reality operating system step four Microsoft spends years ripping out as much of this 3D and mixed realy stuff out of Windows as they can and leaves the rest that it cannot remove around as basically bloat the cycle is complete and here comes the next one step one Chrome OS starts getting popular with Enterprise and educational consumers due to being lightweight and easy to keep secure so step two Microsoft reacts by creating Windows 10s a version of Windows that only allows users to install apps that Microsoft declares to be safe and to show that they are serious they even ship this by default on some surface devices step three it's a complete flop 10s can't compete with Chrome OS on low-end Hardware because it's still full fat windows underneath its edge browser is also inferior to Chrome and it confuses users who randomly bought a Surface by telling them that they can't installed their usual apps on their new computer step four after just one year Microsoft kills the operating system and has to undo everything leaving it only as an optional switch for Enterprise users that barely any of them still use okay ready for one last example step one foldables become an exciting new category step two Microsoft builds the surface Neo and creates a massive rewrite off its operating system called Windows 10x for dual screen devices step three this flops the operating system is rushed Intel's chips still suck on thin and light devices more than a decade after the iPad got launched and the interest from App Developers for dual screen form factors on Windows is basically non-existent step four Microsoft completely scraps the operating system and the hardware before even releasing it at least some of the design of 10x actually gets ported over to become Windows 11 on regular PCS but the majority of the work behind the project basically just gets thrown away I could go on with the examples but I think the pattern is blindingly obvious once you see it Microsoft for about a decade now has been trying and failing to turn Windows into something completely new a tablet OS a mixed reality OS a dual screen OS a competitor to Chrome OS Etc and they were spinning around in circles as they did and undid each one of these meanwhile their competitors just quietly worked on mostly getting better at doing computer stuff and could spend their resources on for example building better chips for their computers this is not to say that there haven't been any major improvements to Windows in all this time of course there have been but at this light I actually find it surprising that they haven't lost more share than they have and it shows just how sticky platforms can be now Windows 11 I think is the first version of Windows since 2009 that actually breaks this pattern this release has not introduced any new Computing paradigms but T has primarily focused on refining the actual core PC experience this includes cleaning out Decades of old user interface inconsistencies across the desktop like old context menus and cleaning up the system settings app it includes a general visual modernization of the operating system and it includes finally giving core new features to the inbox apps too file explorer getting tabs notepad getting autosave Snipping Tool being able to record videos paint getting layers and find finally being able to handle transparent images Etc these are all very much obvious desktop improvements that Microsoft should have built a decade ago but finally just got to under Windows 11 this acceptance I think is a factor of the rest of Microsoft completely outgrowing windows and that means that the company no longer has to try to make this poor operating system carry the entire organization forward on its own but now that the focus is back the next question is whether windows can actually gain back some of the market share that they've lost and I think for that they need to figure out two concrete things first is chips since 2020 Apple's self-designed arm-based M series chips gave it a massive power efficiency and performance Advantage especially on thin and light laptops these incredible chips have at least in part contributed to Mac os's rapid rise in places like the US and so Windows needs to at least match them if they want to stop the bleeding maybe Intel and AMD will step up to do that task but the newest hope is that arm chips will do the trick for Windows just like they did for Macos except on Windows we might actually get some real competition here first qualcom has just announced their new Snapdragon X Series chips in Hawaii and they claimed that these are exactly the chips that Windows laptops especially have been waiting for the CPUs are designed by many of the same people who designed Apple's M series chips they are custom design based on arm just like the M series and qualcom showed a bunch of benchmarks at their event where they thoroughly beat everyone from Apple to Intel and am on performance and power efficiency as well now we'll have to wait for thirdparty tests to see if these cherry-picked benchmarks actually hold any water but this at least is one promising option and then while Qualcomm had an exclusive deal with Microsoft for arm chips that deal seems to be expiring any day now and we're already getting rumors that Nvidia and AMD are planning to make arm-based Windows chips too mediatech has already started working on their PC chips including apparently ones that you can pair with a dedicated Nvidia graphic F card and I see no reason why Samsung and Huawei for example wouldn't at least consider this as well when Windows could basically only run on x86 chips that meant that only Intel and AMD could make the processors for Windows those are the only two companies that have the licenses for it but basically anyone can make arm chips so I hope there will be real competition soon and while the chips hopefully figure themselves out Microsoft also needs to make sure that they figure out how to make the operating system and especially apps run better on Windows on arm because especially in the beginning the software side of things has been pretty unimpressive to see how far windows on arm has come as a platform so far I actually asked Lenovo to send me their most current Snapdragon 8cx gen 3 powered PC ahead of the Qualcomm event and here are my thoughts on the platform on the plus side this chip and the ThinkPad gets me the same incredible 8 to 12 hours of real world battery life and the same completely cool fanless ultra thin and light experience as my M1 MacBook Air and while the raw performance can't exactly match the mech the system itself and most of the apps were actually super responsive I even got the same generative AI features in Photoshop for example that I got on the Mac due to this Snapdragon chip having an npu or a dedicated AI processor on board just like the Mac so that's a significantly better Baseline than I expected but 6 years in Windows on arm still has a significant app problem here's a list of apps that I tried running on the platform and they fall into four categories the best ones are compiled natively for arm these run basically flawlessly I happen to use many of these apps basically daily so for me this is a surprisingly decent selection next are apps like slack Discord and notion which don't have a native ARM version but since their desktop apps are basically just websites pretending to be apps anyway you can save their web versions as apps from Microsoft Edge and you probably won't even notice the difference they work great type three are the apps that can only run in emulation these technically work and I'm super happy that many of them are here because there are no easy alternatives to them in some cases but they are a little bit less responsive than the native ones I find this performance completely acceptable for simple apps like the signal desktop app or maybe audacity but more complex apps like Chrome are simply not enjoyable longterm and type four are the really complex apps that require specific Hardware optimizations like many video editing programs or intensive games which often simply do not run at all hey uh editing Mar here while I was working on this video the news came out that da Vinci resolve from Blackmagic is going to come natively to the windows on arm platform previously you basically couldn't even open the app at all on Windows on arm so I think this is a pretty good sign that at least some of the bigger app makers are taking the windows on arm platform a little bit more seriously now that we have better more powerful Snapdragon chips and so on so fingers crossed that we get better support soon okay and now back to the rest of the video now there are tons of rumors and job postings hinting at next year's Windows 12 being all about improving arm support but but for now there are still too many trade-offs for this to be a truly Mass Market platform the direction is good though and if you can get it good enough then windows on arm together with better chips could stop plenty of people from switching away from Windows but beside that Microsoft would also have to find a compelling reason to make people switch back to Windows 2 and for now they seem to be pretty convinced that that will be AI features they have already teased their plans to cram AI into every corner of the operating system every app and every service that they have ai is their next big hail Mar and for once I think they might actually be well set to succeed with it unlike with other Tech Trends Microsoft is actually kind of ahead of the curve with AI and is not rushing to catch up with a competitor they're the largest shareholder of open AI at 49% and they have exclusive access to their products they have already built multiple successful AI applications such as GitHub co-pilot which millions of people use daily they own more productivity apps and services from office to VSS code and more that would definitely all benefit from AI Integrations if done well and for once I think all of these AI features are a trend that actually makes sense to be integrated into the PC platform people naturally turn to their PCS to do a lot of creative work writing coding data crunching Etc and so having AI help with these tasks could actually make a whole lot of sense will AI be big deal for Windows I don't know but I guess it has better chances of succeeding than Windows turning into a tablet OS so that's a start let me know in the comments if you think to have a chance but before that I have a little secret to share for this whole video the entire voiceover part that you've been listening to was recorded with this really unique microphone called the mod mic this is a wireless microphone that you can magnetically attach to almost any pair of headphones to make yourself sound incredible you just stick one of the four stickers that you get in the Box on your headphones then you plug your USB receiver into your computer and bada bada boom high quality audio for your Zoom calls and your gaming sessions of course for the voiceover part I applied a little bit of processing to the audio as I do with any microphone here in the studio here's what this microphone sounds like without any processing applied to it and by the way you might be hearing that I'm still a little bit sick that's in my voice as well but I bet that for the most part I guess the majority of you did not notice that I wasn't using my regular studio microphones in this video beside the sound quality you also get 12 hours of battery life a dedicated mute button and a super highquality Bluetooth connection I recorded for 60 minutes straight for this video and I did not have a single Dropout in that time better yet while this microphone is already pretty affordable at around 140 bucks depending on your region with my link that is in the description and the code ta15 you will even get a 15% discount on top of that on their products now beside that the company also has these incredible inear monitors that you're listening to right now because these have a microphone and they sound fantastic oh get this the microphone is also removable how cool is that I love a sponsor where you can just demonstrate the quality this easily and so if you want to sound this good be sure to use my link that is in the description and also the code ta15 and I'll see you in the next [Music] video

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 791,955

Keywords: Microsoft, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 12, Windows 7, Steven Sinofsky, iPad, Windows Mixed Reality, Windows on ARM, Snapdragon, Snapdragon Elite X, Snapdragon X Elite, Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, The Story behind, TechAltar, Tech Altar, The Friday Checkout, market share, sales, decline, death, dying, MacOS, chip, chips, M series, M1, M2, M3, Apple M3, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AI, Copilot, cycles

Id: fR7KqCbnjfw

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023