The End of Windows? Hardly (Premium)

In my book Windows Everywhere, I chart the rise and fall of Windows as a platform. But whether it’s through inertia or the failings of its would-be competitors, most people who need desktop productivity functionality today still use Windows. And so the question is whether that ever changes. Could Windows be overtaken by alternatives like the Mac, Linux, Chromebooks and/or tablets?

While anything is possible, the evidence to date suggests that this won’t happen in the near term. Sure, the PC industry has experienced a post-pandemic period of decline, but so too have the smartphone and tablet markets. And there’s nothing unique about the PC that makes it especially immune or susceptible to broader trends. The PC is just as necessary to its audience as those other device types are to theirs.

But looking at the most obvious competitors to the PC, there has been some movement in usage recently. Whether this is dramatic or not will depend on your perspective. For example, StatCounter reports that usage of Windows-based PCs in the desktop computer market was 75.21 percent in July 2022 and 69.52 percent in July 2023, a year-over-year (YOY) decline of 7.6 percent. But Mac usage has surged in the Apple Silicon era, jumping 29 percent, from 14.51 percent to 20.42 percent share, in this same time period. (Also-rans like ChromeOS and Linux barely factor, with roughly 3 percent usage share each and flat growth.)

That seems definitive. But annual market share (unit sales) tells a more nuanced story: the Mac accounted for 7.8 percent of all personal computers sold in 2021, the same figure it had obtained the year before. But it lost ground in 2022, finishing the year with just 7.2 percent market share. Apple fans, eager to cast their favorite company in a positive light, claimed that this slippage was explained by the fact that the first-generation M1 chipsets were so good that customers didn’t need to upgrade again in 2022 when the M2 family arrived. I assume it’s clear why that argument makes no sense at all and is easily discarded. But the point here is that 7, 8 percent share, whatever, isn’t enough to dominate the personal computer market. (Remember that the Mac had 5 percent share when Steve Jobs returned to the company in the late 1990s.)

These two sets of metrics, seemingly contradictory, both tell their own story, their own version of the relative health and performance of these products. And there are other ways to look at this market. For example, Apple’s transition of the Mac from Intel to Apple Silicon chipsets has been a brilliant and unadulterated success, while Microsoft’s attempts to port Windows to similar Arm-based chipsets happened much more slowly, is far less technically successful (especially from an application performance perspective), and the resulting products sell so poorly they’re not even a footnote.

So one can easily argue that Apple has done a better job, overall, in positioning the Mac for a future that is highly mobile, performant, and compatible. Sure. And one can just as easily argue that the more complex PC market, where a single OS vendor must contend with the competing needs of different silicon vendors, PC makers, and hardware peripherals suppliers, naturally moves much more slowly in this regard. And that, despite all the technical challenges, the PC is in a great place when it comes to performance, uptime, and reliability. As pragmatically, Apple’s advances—and its natural advantages regarding cross-compatibility with iPhones and its first-party services— haven’t moved the sales needle as much as fans perhaps expected. Windows doesn’t have the 90 percent share it had at the turn of the century, obviously, but it’s still dominant in this space.

I’m thinking and writing about this now because I came across an article in Computerworld claiming that “Windows is a declining ecosystem.” This caught my eye for obvious reasons, and on my first pass through it, I find myself kind of nodding my head in agreement with some of the claims. The person who supplied the quote in the article’s headline noted that “Windows will not be the dominant ecosystem in 10 year’s [sic] time” and that “Apple is coming up because it already dominates the mobile enterprise.” Windows has no mobile device in this mobile age, the article notes. And thus, the platform can’t be an “endpoint leader.”

“Apple, meanwhile, has the leading smartphone used in the enterprise, the leading enterprise tablet, and the fastest-growing PC used in the enterprise,” the author of the article claims. “These represent major changes to enterprise tech.”

Um. OK.

I let these claims kind of roll around in my brain for a while before attempting to write about this topic. I almost tackled it on the plane ride home from Mexico, for example, but the CMA published Microsoft’s 34-page explanation of the “material changes” that had occurred since the agency blocked Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and I felt that was a more timely topic. And now I’m glad I waited. Because this claim is almost complete bullshit.

For starters, the person being interviewed for this article is Dean Hagar, the outgoing CEO of a company called Jamf. I had to look up Jamf, and what I found puts his comments in perspective. Jamf, it turns out, offers exactly one service to exactly one market: it provides mobile device management (MDM) exclusively for Apple devices. MDM is a light-touch device management technology originally designed for smartphones and other mobile devices, a sort of modern, cloud-based alternative to the heavy-touch PC and device management capabilities that Microsoft provided (and for legacy reasons still provides) via Windows Server and Endpoint Configuration Manager, formerly called System Center Configuration Manager, or SCCM.

Anyway, it’s not surprising that Jamf’s business has grown, given the popularity of the iPhone: in 2015, Jamf had 4,000 customers running on about 3 million devices, while today it has over 72,000 customers running more than 30 million Apple devices. “Apple has a clear path, in my view, for winning the enterprise,” he claimed.

But Microsoft also offers MDM capabilities through a product it’s offered for a long time called Intune. And unlike Jamf, Microsoft doesn’t discriminate against different device types: it works with Windows, Android, iPhones, Macs, whatever. Microsoft doesn’t break out Intune seats like Jamf does, but it does break out an offering called Enterprise Mobility, in which a subset of Intune usage occurs. And in its most recent earnings report, Microsoft noted that the Enterprise Mobility installed base grew 11 percent year-over-year to 256 million seats.

So Enterprise Mobility, which represents just a portion of overall Intune usage, is used on approximately 8.5 times as many devices than Jamf. (Put another way, if Enterprise Mobility and Jamf were the entire MDM market, Jamf would have 11.7 percent usage share.) It’s not hard to believe that more Apple users are on Intune than are on Jamf. But whatever: Windows PCs, Android devices, and Apple devices of all kinds are used in the enterprise today, managed by whatever solutions. But for Windows to truly decline, it’s not the iPhone that needs to surpass it, as PC and phone usage are complementary. It’s the Mac. And there is no indication that Mac usage in the enterprise is growing appreciably (more or less than the overall rate). It is perhaps relevant that Hagar does not break down Mac usage via Jamf or even mention the Mac explicitly.

I do agree with one general statement that he makes, as I’ve made it myself, though I was referring not just to Apple iPhones but also to Chromebooks, Android devices, and Google productivity services. Here’s his version.

“We live in an environment where people using the technology have a stronger voice than they’ve ever had in the history of the corporate world,” he said. “And ultimately that voice will prevail. They will choose the technology that they want, and this just wasn’t true 20 or even 10 years ago. But the world has changed, employees have a choice, and those organizations that don’t allow that choice are falling behind today.”

My version is that a coming generation of productivity users is learning on Apple and Google devices and using Google services, and that when they enter the workforce, they will expect to use those same products and services. Same idea, though my version isn’t so Apple-centric. But both are a warning to Microsoft when you think about it.

Anyway, the central issue with Hagar’s argument is that the enterprise has been open to using heterogeneous devices for a long time. But it has shown no willingness to drop Microsoft broadly on the backend/infrastructure side, and I doubt it ever will. Yes, this means that Microsoft, to most individuals, slides into a supporting role, an essential service like water or electricity, and has less presence on the front-end/client side. But Windows will retain its key role in desktop computing and productivity. And we know this because there has been no marked shift towards the alternatives even during a time in which Windows, arguably, has been poorly maintained. Inertia is a powerful force, but in the enterprise, it’s even stronger.

But that’s OK. The future is ever-shifting, and it’s reasonable to believe that usage in legacy desktop platforms like Windows may continue declining as smartphones, tablets, and perhaps even Chromebooks get more sophisticated. There’s nothing radical or incorrect about such thoughts, just as there’s nothing weird about believing that Apple’s devices businesses will remain strong. Players in each market play to their strengths.

But Microsoft and Apple are also on different trajectories. And in the same way that Microsoft is smart to shift its Xbox business from being hardware and software focused to being services focused, it should likewise play to this new cloud-era strength elsewhere. And that means that Microsoft might be better off in the long run by not having to support Windows. It may actually be better off, eventually, if Windows did decline. (The cynical among us suspect that this shift explains Windows 11. But I digress.)

This potential future may be hard for me and other Windows enthusiasts to accept, but it’s not as dystopian as it sounds. Indeed, it may be the best possible outcome for Microsoft in the long run.

Microsoft’s business model under Satya Nadella is simple: meet your customers where they are. In the productivity space, this meant bringing high-quality Office apps to iPhone and then other mobile platforms and the web. In Xbox, it means getting out of hardware and pushing subscription service access to games that can be played on any device. And in the enterprise, Microsoft’s efforts to rid customers of on-prem servers like SCCM and move to cloud-based services like Intune and Microsoft 365 means that customers will pay it monthly in perpetuity and not just occasionally for big software purchases.  Apple’s success relies on device sales, though even it is pushing hard into (consumer) services now. But Microsoft’s is all about the cloud and subscriptions (including, it hopes, ads).

In other words, the future that Hagar describes, as fanciful as it is when you consider Jamf’s size compared to Microsoft’s MDM businesses, would in fact benefit Microsoft as much as Apple. And Apple’s imagined dominance of the enterprise would only be in devices, though I think Google and Android will have a say in this too. Whatever the mix, it will mostly be managed by Microsoft, just as it is today. And so Microsoft wins too.

I see Hagar’s comments as self-serving for him and his soon-to-be former employer and I question why Computerworld would promote that company under the guise of an editorial discussion about the future of Windows. But whatever, agree or disagree, it’s an interesting discussion. I just think that my unbiased ideas about the future are closer to reality than Hagar’s. I realize that some people view everything I write through some weird pro-Microsoft lens, but I’m trying to be objective here. And while I’d personally rather see Windows succeed, I can imagine a future where it doesn’t and know that Microsoft would not just survive but thrive.

And unlike certain other opinions, that future doesn’t feel like science fiction and wishful thinking to me.