Microsoft’s Continuum Advantage is Slowly Slipping Away (Premium)

While I feel that the PC still has important advantages, functional and otherwise, over the competition, the gap is closing. And maybe its time to think about some PC key differentiators, and how they might be eliminated by Apple, Google, or others.

I've written about these issues a lot over the past year or so because the competitive landscape is changing so quickly. As Microsoft pushes forward with key platform differentiators, its competitors have responded in kind by eliminating or at least softening Microsoft's advantages. And Microsoft is losing this fight.

For example, last year I openly wondered whether Google or Apple could "pull the plug on the PC market" entirely with me-too hybrid PCs like iPad Pro and the Pixel C. More recently, Google has announced plans to bring Android apps to Chromebook---creating a new kind of 2-in-1, really---and Apple has stepped up its iPad Pro advertising ahead of second-generation devices, using Microsoft's own "mobile first, cloud first" strategy against it.

PCs are still the preferred productivity platform, of course. They are more versatile and affordable than Macs, period. And they are far more powerful and full-featured than mobile competitors based on Android and iOS. This is indisputable. (Also, some tasks will require "real" PCs for the foreseeable future; for example, you cannot develop software on mobile platforms, yet.)

But it is also indisputable that our usage patterns, collectively, have changed a lot in the ten years since Saint Jobs (tm) unleashed the Jesus Phone---sorry, the iPhone---on the unwashed masses. I have described this event as the "asteroid that killed the Windows dinosaur" on many occasions for good reason. We can have fun with it all we want, but that was a watershed moment for the industry. And, more important, for the billions of people who consume personal computing services.

By which I mean, we---collectively---do not use PCs as much as we used to. Many, in fact, no longer need PCs at all. And the truth to that assertion can be seen most clearly in PC sales, which have now fallen for 20 straight quarters, year-over-year. That is five straight years of PC sales decline.

Over here on the Microsoft side of the fence, enthusiasts are grappling---emotionally and logically---with the side-effects of this change. Microsoft, for its part, is forging ahead, and as I noted recently in HoloLens News is Just the Latest Evidence of Microsoft’s Real Focus, it has tied its future to cloud services. And to ensuring that those services work well on all popular client platforms, regardless of origin. This is why we see so many Microsoft apps on Android and iOS. Because that is where its customers are today, on mobile.

But Microsoft also has this side business, which I think of as "serving the base." That is, it has well over one billion users on Windows PCs, still, users who wake up every morning and tune into their world via dinosaur applications like O...