Here I am, and I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but I am seriously looking at the Mac as a future for my computing needs. Why? Well, I don’t like the way that Microsoft is going so if I were to switch to the Mac I really wouldn’t have that much trouble finding software to run on it. A lot of software, mainstream software, is cross platform compatible. It’s not like the dark days in which Windows was it; if you didn’t run Windows you were sunk.
In fact, that’s why I figure Microsoft is going the way they are. They see their one time desktop monopoly slipping away and they are grasping at straws trying to hold onto relevance in today’s cross platform, non-Microsoft dominated world. You can see that in how they are making apps for the iPhone and Android devices. Things like Office, OneNote, Skype, Outlook, OneDrive, etc. They aren’t making these apps for other platforms just for the sake of making them available, they are making them available because they need to or they’re dead.
The computing industry that we have today is not a Microsoft dominated industry anymore and Microsoft knows it. They sat on their desktop monopoly for too long and the rest of the industry flew past them while they were sleeping. But like any big ship it will take time for a gigantic behemoth such as Microsoft to change direction. Unfortunately for Microsoft, other companies that are smaller and more agile are slowly killing Microsoft.
Will Microsoft ever recover and get back to their glory days? I don’t think so. There’s too much competition and smaller companies that can quickly and easily change direction at a moment’s notice.
One of the problems that Microsoft has is that they are dragging behind them almost twenty years of code dating back to the early 1990s. One of the biggest advantages of Windows is that it’s compatible with legacy software but in doing so it’s dragging behind it twenty years of buggy, security hole ridden code from the dark old days of computing. It would be in Microsoft’s best interest to simply scrap Windows as we know it today and rewrite the thing, from the kernel upwards. But that’s never going to happen. Like a rusty bucket, it keep leaking and they keep patching it.
Other companies that are smaller, more agile, and don’t have to answer to decades of legacy software can change direction and make their software leaner, cleaner, more efficient, and faster than anything Microsoft has.
Last updated on Saturday, May 30th, 2015 at 12:33 PM by trparky.