Bonum Certa Men Certa

The 'Windows Era' Already Came to an End

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 05, 2025

Less than a week ago:

IDC cuts PC sales forecast, blames Trump tariffs and AI PC (Windows) hurdles

Related (last week): Microsoft is Admitting That It Has No Viable Business Model, Starting to Experiment

iOS is about to become bigger than Windows in Africa as Windows sinks to new lows:

Operating System Market Share Africa

The latest Daily Links (under "Proprietary") showed some rather disturbing statements from Microsoft. In a nutshell, they admit they lied. They admit a lot of what they said was hype. They also admit cutting and slicing things, not growing.

What does that have to do with Windows? A lot.

Microsoft didn't gain much of its power because of MS-DOS, which was hardly innovative. What brought Microsoft monopoly power of unprecedented proportions (except maybe IBM) was Windows.

But Windows isn't selling anymore. When it does sell, it's sold to the OEM, not the user. It's just licensed to run on some PCs (whose sales are declining) and the price of a Windows licence goes down because otherwise it just cannot compete with stuff like "Chromebooks".

Microsoft said to shareholders everything would be alright because of "clown computing" and then "hey hi" (that buzzword nowadays just means some computational load running on "clown computing"). Now they name-drop "quantum" BS, hype, propaganda, and vapourware (example from this week) because when you have nothing left to sell you just start making stuff up [1, 2] and hope that shareholders don't know any better.

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