Is Microsoft Windows invulnerable re an real competition for the foreseeable future?

Great Debates
41

In my experience as a tech, the tech market ALREADY IS, a blue collar market.

I have no college degree, neither did my last boss, in fact only one person in the IT dept there did. My current partner never went to college, in fact most people I know in the computer market have no college. Or else they have an unrelated degree. On the upper spectrum you have more people with degrees, but then again Mechanics for Ferraris and Porsche’s oftentimes have degrees too.

As for Windows market share. I think I’d watch out for Windows to steadily lose share. Linux now outnumbers Macintosh machihnes worldwide 4-3. Macintosh’s market share has not shrunk in a couple of years. OS X is probably the finest OS out there on the market, it can run Windows/Unix/Mac apps all pretty well.

I think the two things you will see that will hurt the MS market is a more user friendly Linux which will start making a viable option for the workstation market for businesses to cut costs, therefore they will. Also as part of this, the compatibility with windows ports will become more and more seemless. When this happens, Windows will be largely irrelevant.

The second is OS X being released for PCs. According to rumors this port already exists, and why wouldn’t it? It’s just a marketing option at this point I would think. OS X is VASTLY superior to Windows, and a lot of people are switching to it in droves. If I could afford a laptop it would be a Mac and not a PC, then again, I’ve been doing Mac and PC tech support for years, so I’m not exactly the market that’s going to increase market share.

Erek

42

Only because of the distorting effects of the dot-com bubble, when a lot of people skipped college and got enough experience to remain employed.

43

hansel: But doesn’t that kind of color who will be making the hiring decisions in the future?

Erek

44

Nonsense. I’ve been in software development for 20+ years, and there’s always been a mix of degreed and non-degreed people making and supporting products.

45

Are you sure about the Windows part ?

46

Reasons to switch: IE, Outlook Express etc. extremely vulerable to worm and virus attacks. No alternative windowing manager (skins don’t count). An architecture inherrently flawed, designed to be insecure. Lack of support (unless you pay). The necesscity to constantly applying patches. Inabilty to pick and choose which parts to install. Planned obsolescence. The requirement to periodally re-intall. I think that’s good enough for starters.

47

Yep, with Virtual PC, you’ve been able to run Windows apps on a Mac for the past five years or so. It hasn’t been that great up until now, but now it’s pretty good. Performance loss, obviously applies. i’m not sure if it will run EVERYTHING, but it runs a lot of stuff, and you can drag and drop between OS’s.

Erek

48

mswas: Are you sure OS X is going to be released for Windows? I have heard rumors of very minimal versions (nothing that is really usable) being worked on, but that is all. Without Apple’s consent, it isn’t going to happen, I shouldn’t think.

But if true, this will not help Apple’s hardware sales at all. (The main reason I have a Mac is for the OS.) I know that Apple has Mac-only apps like Final Cut Pro (considered the best video editing app out there by some). Apple won’t release a Windows version of Final Cut Pro (at least last I heard) because some filmmakers are getting Macs just to run FCP. And some Unix geeks are buying Macs just to run OS X. If these apps will run on PCs, where’s the incentive to buy Mac hardware?

Do you know something that other Macheads don’t know?

49

Nah, I am just spreading rumors too.

nitpick: If it were running OS X, it wouldn’t be a windows machine.

I think there is a port of Darwin for x86, but I don’t think there is one for the GUI. As for the hardware issue, I think it would be a matter of high end vs low end. Apple would continue making high end stuff, and people would continue to buy it. Maybe they would move out of the hardware market except for laptops. Who knows? It’s just a rumor.

Erek

50

Apple should have been a software company, not a hardware company. If the Mac OS were available for the PC, Microsoft wouldn’t be what it is today.

51

FWIW, My company (small business) is about to buy 5 iBooks for our salesman in the field, even though the vast majority of our computers are runing Windows. The features/price of the hardware are very competitive and OS X is interoperable enough with Windows (MS Office for X) for our needs.

If Apple’s desktop systems become as compelling price/performance-wise as their notebooks are, I can see them gaining a good amount of market share.

52

Well, I’m going to put my .2 cents in and say that OS X is the first Mac OS to be superior to windows in MANY MANY MANY years. I don’t know where people got the idea that the previous OSes crash less than Windows but it simply isn’t true. Windows 98 was more stable than OS 9 and being that OS 9 was the competitor of Windows 2000, that’s pretty damning.

Erek

53

Personally, I preferred OS 9 to Windows 98. OS 8.x and then 9 are what prompted me to buy an iMac and later a very nice G4 tower. I was so sick of trying to get my PC to work. Photoshop 6 froze on it and was slow. Couldn’t get CDs to burn half the time and installing a digital camera was hell. My iMac (running OS 8.6 and then OS 9.2) did all these things much better than my PC, even though it was supposted to be (“technically”) as fast or faster. Oh, I’m sure that my PC had special problems, but that’s what I had to work with.

So I liked OS 9 a lot. But, I eventually (grudgingly at first) went to OS X. I was unused to it at first, and resisted. For about a week. Now I barely ever boot into OS 9 (I have both OSes on my Mac) and when I do go to 9, I am amazed at how unstable it is compared to OS X. (I have OS X.2—love it!)

I have a new (inexpensive) PC with XP Pro, and it’s not bad. (Better than Win 98, in my limited experience.) Actually, I like more than a few things a bout it. But it’s no OS X.

54

I should say, that my PC was supposed to be “technically” as fast or faster than my iMac(s). (I had two.)

55

yosemite: Hmm, that’s quite possible. I have supported both for years, and I found htat in my experience the PCs were far more stable than the Macs. Windows 98 was by no means a stable operating system, and I would definitely prefer OS X to Windows XP, but alas, Macs are expensive and PCs are not.

Erek

56

I wonder what would happen if Apple began making Mac OS for Intel-based machines.

Anyone know if there are significant hardware advantages to the Motorola architecture that would make an Intel version of Mac OS inferior?

57

I work in the IT industry, and use Windows/Unix/Linux on a daily basis. I have read many people saying that Linux is easier to install than XP, whilst its easier than it used to be, Linux is still not in the same league as Windows for the average user. Ive used and installed RedHat from version 6 to the very latest, and as its got more “user friendly” the performance has dropped considerably, the same for both Mandrake and SuSE. I run the latest version of all these and XP on identical machines at work, and the windows machine is faster, and though i thought i would never have heard myself saying it “more stable” than any of the Linux boxes. When used as a server Unix/Linux is great, only in command line mode. But add the graphical interface,and it becomes the same as Windows “bloated”. Even in the server world Windows 2000 server has proved itself to be an equal to unix/linux as a stable platform.
Many people have also said that Windows is prone to worms and virus’s , thats true, BUT SO IS LINUX. Because so many PC’s in the world use windows, it stands to reason that the majority of bad stuff is going to be writen for them. People have the impression that Unix/LInux boxes are more hardened security wise. Thats simply not true, out of the box they are as vunerable to attack as any windows machine, ive proven this using Bastille/Nesus scans. There is room for many OS’s and each have there strong and weak points.

Sorry for the long scribe

58

Probably it was a figurative horse’s head.

A manufacturer who wants to install Windows on his machines has to pay a fee for every machine he makes, NOT just the ones on which he installs Windows. If he makes 100,000 machines and then installs Windows on 80,000 of them and Red Hat on the other 20,000, he still has to pay Microsoft a fee for all 100,000 machines. If he installs a dual boot system (i.e. both Windows and some form of Linux on his machines) Microsoft will insist that Windows be the default OS. So obviously Microsoft is doing all the arm twisting it can to discourage manufacturers from installing a non-Microsoft OS on their machines.

59

The conventional Mac operating system (MacOS 9, 8 before it, 7 before that, and its ancestors before that) provides very mixed results in terms of stability and ease of use depending on how much of a geek you are and, to an extent, on what model Mac you’re using.

By no stretch is MacOS 9 inherently stable – it utilizes a single (= unprotected) memory space and even without 3rd-party software loads a hell of a lot of extensions (patches to the underlying OS) which can lead to calls generating unexpected results because anticipated routines have been paved over with modifications.

But if your style of using the computer is to try and reject a dozen or so extensions per month, experiment with different software apps that do the same task, modify preferences and settings, and generally tweak tweak tweak until you’ve got it working the way you want it, you can end up with a workstation that is reliable and incredibly responsive to your needs and work-flow.

On my WallStreet-era PowerBook, MacOS 9 is a very stable environment. More so than XP on my girlfriend’s computer. More so than MacOS X on this computer. In the two latter cases, it is rare for the entire OS to go up in flames, but individual programs go wonky quite often, ranging from crash and burn to still alive but useless until relaunch. I generally have no more than four programs plus running concurrently, but often pile on more than a dozen. For a cooperative (rather than preemptive) multitasking OS, it is astonishingly effective and with a single CPU system like this, more responsive in the frontmost app. Well-written software, written to work in a non-memory-protected environment, generally behaves itself nicely, and the laughably klunky memory-allocation scheme (in which each app is parceled out an allocation of RAM and can’t ask for more unless it has its own virtual-memory scheme) also works surprisingly well to make multiple apps in a shared unprotected memory space a practical and manageable thing.

It may be an antique, but this antique has no problem running two different versions of FileMaker Pro simultaneously along with Photoshop, Eudora, Acrobat, BBedit, AppleWorks, iCab, NetFinder, SoundApp, and VirtualPC (running Windows NT Server and its own copy of FileMaker Pro). If I have one app doing intensive things (e.g, updating 137,000 records after adding a new calc field to a database) I do find iCab or Eudora to be sluggish, but still usable, and I have no worries about switching to them to read email or read the board while FileMaker is chugging away even though I’d hose the company’s database if my system crashed.

hmm, this is all rather off-topic, isn’t it?

Well, I suspect Windows will continue to reign with or without competition for quite some time to come. Don’t bother me as long as I don’t have to use it. After 18 years of being a Mac user, I’m sort of accustomed to the majority of the world using something I wouldn’t dream of using as my day-to-day OS.

60

Sadly, I must agree (with Rogue)about Redhat becoming bloated. Add in that GUI and away it goes.
I still prefer it miles over winXP, simply because I can choose the level of bloat that I add to a far greater degree - and if i use a minimal install, then I can get the bloat down to some very small levels.
Avoid bloat, go Slack? Definitely an option but SlackWare is not really on the user-friendly side of the linux equation. It assumes some knowledge and technical skill on the part of the user.
Frankly I avoid MS products like the plague where possible (although here at work I gotta use them), mostly due to licensing practises I find restricitive, and a sesation of lack of control when I use them (lots more control in a *Nix box).
Love to try the MAC, but like so many others, I find the price of the hardware prohibitive. OS X for Intel…Mmmmmm…sounds good