Microsoft Doesn’t Need Windows Anymore?

InfoWorld's Eric Knorr penned an opinion piece this week in which he claims that Microsoft doesn't need Windows anymore. This seems controversial, and is sure to draw a lot of ire from the fan boys. But he's on to something, and while I think it's a bit premature to write off Windows, it's fair to say that Windows is no longer at the center of Microsoft's existence.

And if your knee-jerk reaction is to come down hard on Mr. Knorr, or me for not completely disagreeing with him, please put down the keyboard for a moment. There's a sane discussion to be had here. Seriously.

First of all, Knorr is not critical of Microsoft at all. In fact, he expresses great respect for Microsoft's "stamina." "As a Microsoft marketing exec once asked me, right before Windows Vista shipped: 'Do you have any idea what it looks like to test the compatibility of 600 printers in one big room?' This is not the sort of work that advances anything. It’s whack-a-mole on a planetary scale."

And his comments about this incident are correct: That kind of attention to detail made sense when Windows was the be-all/end-all of personal computing, but make far less sense today, when Windows PCs are a small and shrinking part of the personal computing experience.

Consider this week's Gartner forecast: Of a total devices market of 2.3 billion units sold in 2016, only 265 million, or just 11.4 percent, will be PCs. And while there will be slight adjustments upwards as enterprises finally start replacing aging PCs, the overall trend is clear: The market for PCs is shrinking.

That said, here is where I will break a bit from Mr. Knorr's assessment, because the PC's decline happens quite slowly, even though the past 4-5 years have been brutal. That is, after a sharp drop in PC sales in recent years, PCs are expected to keep dropping as we go forward, but more slowly.

As important, there are areas of growth, too. PC makers like HP and Lenovo, and, yes, Microsoft, are focusing on the premium segments that Apple has ridden to great success over the past decade and a half. So while the market for PCs will keep getting smaller, it's not necessarily a horrible business in some ways. Assuming, that is, that these firms can attract customers to their higher-priced offerings.

What Mr. Knorr gets very right is his assertion that "nobody writes new applications for Windows anymore."

That's a fact. And this is a topic for which I have much insider information: When Windows 8 flamed out badly, I was told by sources at Microsoft that the software giant had had to take the drastic approach of "mobilifying" Windows 8 for this very reason: No major new Win32 applications had been created in several years. Worse, of the top 10 applications that Windows 8 customers were actually using, the top two---Chrome and iTunes---were literally designed to steal customers from Microsoft. And the other 8 were all utilities to make Windows 8 work more like Windows 7. That's not a healthy e...

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