Gartner Analysts Warn That Windows Is Collapsing

spacefiddle writes "Computerworld has an article about a presentation from Gartner analysts in Las Vegas claiming that Windows is 'collapsing', and that Microsoft 'must make radical changes to the operating system or risk becoming a has-been.' Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald provided an analysis of what went wrong with Vista, and what they feel Microsoft can and must do to correct its problems. Larry Dignan of ZDNet has his own take, and while he agrees, he suggests that the downfall of Windows will be slow and drawn-out. As an interesting tangent to this, there's also a story from a few days prior about Ubuntu replacing Windows for a school's library kiosks, getting good performance out of older hardware. '[Network administrator Daniel] Stefyn said he was "pleasantly surprised" to discover that the Kubuntu desktops ran some applications faster with Linux than when they ran on Windows. An additional benefit of Windows' departure from student library terminals saw the students cease 'hacking the setup to install and play games or trash the operating system.'"

Important lines from TFA

Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista...

You mean the almost-constant nag screens?

or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP...

Making them smarter than the lying marketroids selling it...

to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.

Translation: People are smarter than they think, and an OS that takes twice the hardware to be twice as slow AND even more incompatible with previous software isn't worth my money.

Of course, they still get sales - from the same idiots at my work who want to be upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because it's a bigger number, and then complain that they are confused by Office 2007 and want the tech support guys to "fix" it.

Re:Important lines from TFA

Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista...

You mean the almost-constant nag screens?

Are you sure you mean the almost-constant nag screens?

Are you sure you wish to mod parent up?

ERROR: No mod points in account. Abort, Rety, Fail? _

Here we go again, eh?

For how many years have slashdot 'experts' been predicting the 'downfall' of windows? For 23 years they have not just controlled, the word is 'dominated' the desktop environment. For the majority of computer users, the words 'Windows' and 'Computer' are borderline synonymous.

And you're proof? Because some users believe that 'Vista sucks' blah blah blah. How many people started ringing the bells for Microsoft after Windows ME? We saw how that worked out...

Re:Here we go again, eh?

Gartner owns Slashdot now?

Man, when did this happen?

You are right about one thing... the morons still equate "windows" with "computer". But thanks to the 'tubes, TV, and Apple's marketing, that _is_ changing.

Death knell? Windows will not die with a bang, but with a whimper... but what do I know... I'm posting on Gartner, er Slashdot.

Re:Here we go again, eh?

There is a difference. MS rely on the guidance of marketing analyst PT Barnum ("There's a sucker born every minute"). In the days of ME, this was a fair analysis - most ME users had never seen a computer before. Not only you could sell them most anything, they had no one to turn to who knew better until win2k came out, and then the migration path was obvious.

Unfortunately for MS, virtually the entire world's population now has Windows experience. It was not a great experience.

Some are cretins, and could not interface with a 4x2, but enjoy blaming windows

Some are experienced IT people who have seen Linux/Unix and know how it could be.

Most are now in a position to ask the professionals "Is this as good as it gets?" and being told - no, there IS another way.

Some are migrating to Vista, and realising that if it can get worse, sure as hell it could get better somehow. They know who to ask for advice, and its not the guy in PC world.

Re:Here we go again, eh?

Some are experienced IT people who have seen Linux/Unix and know how it could be.

Was this a pro-linux/unix comment or a pro-windows comment? Its much too ambiguous.

Getting linux running smoothly can be just as trying as windows if not more trying.

Most are now in a position to ask the professionals "Is this as good as it gets?" and being told - no, there IS another way.

A different way, with its own slew of canyon-wide pitfalls. Like... nearly all your software won't work, including your accounting software won't run on it at all, period. Or the minefield of setting up dual screens or wifi, or getting your shiny new blackberry or iphone to sync contacts with outlook... oh wait... no outlook...

Sure ubuntu etc have reached the point where you can build a basic web&email machine very quickly and its pretty simple, but go much beyond that and Linux throws plenty of obstacles into your path. Some can be overcome, some can't.

Re:Here we go again, eh?

Your argument essentially boils down to, "they had a pretty good run so far so I'm assuming they are invincible".

Same how the Roman empire was invincible, really. And the British empire. And let's not even get started on the American empire, which is crumbling before our very eyes.

Where is IBM? Where is Word Perfect? Both ruled supreme in their days, but those days are long gone. And just like IBM, Microsoft will still be around - but not as the powerhouse it once was. It will just be another big player instead.

One day soon the stockholders will ask why Microsoft is sinking so much money into XBox 360 or any of those other loss-making projects that Microsoft enjoys so much. And once they pull the plug on such projects, they will start to wonder if profits wouldn't be higher if Office were in a separate company, not fettered to any particular operating system.

Windows will survive that, as will Microsoft. But it will gradually become a niche product, one of many choices available for the operating system. Hardware will be controlled more and more through hypervisors. Applications will more and more be in virtualized environments of their own (beit virtual machines like Java or .NET, or in interpreted environments like browsers).

And one day, someone will ask "what operating system are you running that on?", and despite being a card-carrying geek with a 4-digit slashdot ID, you will be forced to admit "Uhm, I'm not actually sure." Because it won't matter anymore.

Re:Here we go again, eh?

The Windows Me situation was different.

Microsoft had the entire Windows NT branch practically ready and waiting in the wings to replace it with.

With XP coming to the end of its life for desktop machines, what can they move to this time?

Re:Here we go again, eh?

Ordinarily, it might look like everybody is just decrying their favorite OS...but I think Bill's recent announcement that Win7 is coming next year lends some credence to the speculation.

Think about it--every self-respecting business decided to hold off on Vista until at least after SP1. Well, SP1 has only just arrived, but before those businesses even have a chance to think about migrating, M$ is talking about releasing a completely new OS. It's speculation, sure, but it looks like Redmond believes it too, if they're willing to make a move like this...

Why I'm still with Windows

I would personally love nothing better than to be able to cut the strings and ditch Windows myself. It's expensive and the target-of-choice for virtually every piece of malware, spyware, and virus. But every time I try, I always come back. Why?

Because Apple is even more expensive and just as proprietary as Windows, won't let me build my own system, and is poorly supported by software developers. If Apple dominated the market, there is every reason to believe they would be just as heavy-handed as MS, if not much worse.

Because doing anything in Linux ends up with me banging my head against my computer screen. Even Ubuntu, the most user-friendly distro so far, is an endless series of frustrations. "Why can't I just download a piece of software and double-click on it to install?!?!" "What is the difference between KDE and Gnome and why should it matter?!?!" "Why do I have to go to the command line interface to do even basic stuff?" Hell, until the latest release, Ubuntu wouldn't even let me attach a projector without a complicated edit to the Xorg config file. ARGHHHHH!!!

Windows may die one day, but it's going to take a *lot* more work before anyone else is going to slay that dragon.

students will hack *anything*

An additional benefit of Windows' departure from student library terminals saw the students cease 'hacking the setup to install and play games or trash the operating system.'"

Yeah, that'll last. I'll give it a week before someone finds a manual and migrates their "expertise" to their new operating system.

At home perhaps

I can see this happening rather quickly at home. It hasn't been hard to convince my family members to get away from Windows. While my wife is probably more computer savvy than most, she hasn't had any problems switching from Windows to Linux, and actually likes it more. It's been more difficult for others I've gotten to switch, but in general the result has been positive.

The corporate world is a completely different story, though. Many large, medium, and small companies have committed vast resources to development in .Net. And while a good chunk of that can be run on Mono in a non-Windows environment, it's not entirely the same, and transitioning to something else, from a OS or software perspective, is going to take even more time and money in an economy where money isn't readily available.

Additionally, while you can probably count on your IT staff to have a reasonably easy transition to something other than Windows, your non-tech employee base is almost certainly going to have a great deal of difficulty. Add in the fact that lots of small and mid-size businesses use "friendly" accounting software that runs solely on Windows, and I think Microsoft has a much larger buffer for error than most people think.

Will it happen? God I hope so... but I'm not optimistic it will happen even in the next 5-10 years.

He's not all anti-Microsoft

Michael Silver, it should be noted, is fairly neutral in his coverage of Microsoft. Here is a link to his past papers:

http://www.gartner.com/Search?op=16&f=2&keywords=&bop=0&op=16&sort=73&archived=0&simple1=0&n=8332&authorId=8332&resultsPerSearch=0&dir=70&sort=73&dir=70 [gartner.com]

The problem, as I see it, is not Vista itself. Rather, it is the slow but steady migration from PCs being central to computing tasks to reliance on servers for processing power and storage. Although Outlook client may run on your PC, the real work managing your company's mail is handled in the backrooms on server hardware. They aren't running client Windows back there.

So on the front end, as McNealy and Ellison have been saying for a decade, computers require less and less individual computing power, and backend servers need more and more. This is the problem for Windows because the growing requirements of the OS to do all the cool things that users like is outstripping the pace at which the needs of the users are growing. Translation: Vista does too much unnecessary stuff (however cool and flashy it might be.)

Apple does this too, but their hardware requirements are automatically met by virtue of them selling the hardware themselves. Linux, OTOH, is both a low-end client and a high-end server. It fills the roles needed by users without bringing with it a hefty cost per unit.

The upshot is that the PC as a computing platform is ailing. It will always have its place, and it will hang on for quite a while longer. However, the general trend towards less necessary functionality on the client end and more stability and power on the server side means that alternative systems now have a lower hurdle to gain a foothold in the upcoming paradigm shift.

We have already seen a huge shift away from laptops as the mobile computer towards dedicated devices like the Blackberry and smartphone. As we progress, many of the roles that the PC plays now will move closer to the user so that the usage scenario no longer is sitting in front of a glowing monitor but rather sitting back and doing the same job faster and more easily than currently performed. I, for one, welcome our new embedded overlords.

Part of technology life cycle

Despite Microsoft's valiant efforts, the real problem is that PCs running a windows-ish GUI have become a ubiquitous utility in our society, just like water and roads and electricity and phones. This is not a good thing for a technology company. It was not good for Bell for phones to evolve from a cutting-edge innovative technology to a ubiquitous utility, or for Edison for electricity to do the same.

When a technology service becomes ubiquitous and homogenous and - importantly - ceases being innovative, it runs the risk of becoming a candidate for conversion into a public utility. To stave this off, either ongoing innovation is required or the illusion of innovation and change is required. Microsoft has done a bit of both with Windows. But it's a thin veneer. As a result, poopulist efforts to 'socialize' this technology into a public utility are surging; hence, Ubuntu et al.

There never was a Windows OS!

Windows NT was developed by Dave Cuttler (of DEC VMS team) based on a operating system specification developed by IBM. (It was supposed to be released under the name OS/2 version 3).
Microsoft implemented the Windowing API on top of that operating system.

The fact is that Microsoft has never developed a commercial operating system from scratch!!!

They have only incremented the original Windows NT (a.k.a. OS/2 v3.0) code base, for example by:
  - replacing the OS/2 file system delivered in Windows NT with the more modern NTFS
  - re-writing the OS/2 deveice driver layer of Windows NT with a new, 32-bit and C-based API [the original NT device driver model was 16-bit and assembler-based]
  - moving the implementation of the graphics API into the ring-0 kernel [big mistake!]
  - replacing the OS/2 multitaskin DOS compatibility (i.e. the text window of Windows) with a less DOS-compatible one, which was supposed to run on multiple processor architectures.

The effort to create a new operating system core for Vista failed because of lack of in-house knowlege.

The task of writing a new core OS (under the Windows API) seems to be too difficult for a company run by marketing people and lawyers.

legacy code

If anything, legacy code will be Microsofts downfall (as TFA stated). I saw this happen firsthand for a company I worked for over a decade ago. They had a pretty impressive application and a long list of Fortune 500 corporations as customers. Even IBM (we're talking back before the Windows 3.x days) was basically giving the company a few million dollars a year for the privilege of reselling the software themselves. Well rather than build new versions of the application from the ground up, or even introducing potential incompatibilities between major releases, the powers that be insisted on full backward compatibility.

Over time more competitors showed up in the marketplace, and as the economy shifted IBM stopped tossing money in our laps. Our engineers (of which I was one) spent most of their time trying to figure out how to shoehorn new features and entire new parallel products on top of the existing legacy codebase. The inevitable result was that we struggled while our competitors came out with newer, more modern & more powerful software. I eventually left that company to go to a startup where 7 others from this company had already gone to. That company was acquired a couple years later, and the application pretty much no longer exists.

If the engineers, who had requested the ability to create a new product from the ground up, had been listened to, then perhaps that company would still be around and competitive. It was mainly because of the business decisions to retain backward compatibility, like MS has done with Windows, that they eventually disappeared. As long as MS maintains their own demand for backward compatibility they'll be waging a slow & prolonged war that they have no chance of winning.

And the IMF says we're in recession ...

Of course Windows is going to decline.

The International Monetary Fund [telegraph.co.uk] just announced that the sub-prime crisis has tipped the USA into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. During recessions, the first thing to get cut back on is unnecessary infrastructure replacement -- and PCs have been marketed on the basis of planned obsolescence [wikipedia.org] for around a decade now. So the PC replacement cycle will be hit, hard.

Vista is a resource hog, Ubuntu is just about coming up to mass market usability, and a lot of places are going to stop replacing their PCs annually or bi-annually in the next couple of years. Unless Windows 7 is as comparatively lightweight as XP, it's going to crash in the "upgrade your OS" market -- only new PCs will ship with it. So Microsoft will have two poor sellers in a row -- which is enough, in the mind of the fickle public, to establish a trend, and with Apple chowing down on 25% of the high-end laptop market already, they're in danger of being squeezed between a high-end competitor and a low-end one.

But.

Windows is so big, with such a huge established base, that its decline will resemble that of the old IBM mainframe environment -- which is still doing fine, decades after the death of the mainframe was predicted. This ain't going to happen overnight.

Re:Really?

Of course not, that is stupid. But you would still say Linux can run on these devices despite the fact it also has to be recompiled and tweaked etc. I think what they are arguing is that Apple uses the same code base for the iPhone as it does for their desktops. Microsoft however has two completely seperate products for Windows and Windows Mobile which increases the development costs and complexity.

Re:Really?

Steve has shown in 5 years that Apple can release more interesting stuff than Microsoft. Apple just "does" it, they don't pre-announce years in advance. Steve just shows up on sage with a fully operational Intel Mac running Apple's software Suite (OSX, iLife, etc) on day 1, or with a fully functioning iPhone that happens to have used OSX, on day 1.

Microsoft bellyaches how "hard" software is to make, and constantly delays (and they don't make computers or phones and sell them) Apple makes it look very easy and investors are starting to see Microsoft isn't really that good at their CORE job.

Re:Really?

This confusion is very common. There is the core OS and the MacOS X product you can buy in boxes. The core OS does not include Finder or Aqua. Just by getting rid of the superfluous components, Apple was able to shrink OSX to a bare minimum and then, just by selectively compiling the parts that made sense to include in the phone and iPod products, they achieved the desired footprint. It's like compiling a minimal kernel on Linux or BSD - really simple.

There could have been some problems with ARM-incompatible stuff, but those problems did not prevent the product launch.

As for developing, doing it for the iPhone OS is very close to developing for MacOS. Not everything is present, but it is a lot easier than to transition from desktop Windows to Windows CE.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did shrink it even further for smaller devices. The iPhone/iPod Touch have proven it can be done and getting rid of OpenGL ES, CoreAnimation and Cocoa Touch would end up in a very, very small OS.

Yes. Microsoft painted itself into a corner. They will, eventually, figure a way to get out, but I am not sure they will do it in time.

Re:Really?

so who's to say that Microsoft can't trim Windows in order to fit better on a handheld?

I think that is the point. 5 years of development and one service pack later MS is still struggling to get Vista to run on the machines it was designed for. Creating a lean palm version would be a million miles away.

I am not aware of the detailed structure of Vista's kernel, but my guess would be it is unlikely to be easily scaled down - it is an OS that requires higher specifications than XP to do mundane tasks like file copying. That doesn't suggest efficiency and portability.

Re:I'll never believe it...

Forget netcraft.

It is official. Gartner now confirms: Windows is collapsing.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community
when Gartner confirmed that Windows is collapsing in complete disarray and
risks becoming a has-been. Coming on the heels of a recent survey which
plainly states that by the end of 2007 only 6.3 percent of the 50,000
enterprise computer users it surveyed were working with Vista.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Windows' future. The
hand writing is on the wall: Windows faces a bleak future. In fact there
won't be any future at all for Windows because Windows is collapsing.
Things are looking very bad for Windows. As many of us are already aware,
Windows continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of
blood.

Fact: Windows is collapsing

Re:Hacking the setup

1) The kids don't know Ubuntu/Gnome like they do Windows. Once they figure it out, they'll continue trashing them and installing games.

The point is they can't trash Linux since they only have write access to /home/user. Neither can they install games except to /home/user. It's trivial to simply reset /home/user to a default state with every login. Like most changes on Linux, this does not require a reboot.

2) The morons should properly secure the computers in the first place. If user rights were properly limited in the first place, they wouldn't have had any issues with the Windows machines. And if they don't limit them properly on the Linux ones, they'll have the same problem.

Rights are properly configured on Linux by default. Your hypothetical kids in the library won't be able to touch anything system related, or anything not owned by the user. There is no configuration required to enforce this.

That is not how it works in Windows. Yes, you can enforce user levels in XP but some apps will not work, and it is pretty easy to bypass anyway. Maybe Vista is better, but I certainly don't expect to see Vista on a public terminal anytime soon.

Re:Hacking the setup

1) Is solved by disabling anything except the C drive as a boot device and setting a BIOS and a grub password. The case may need to be physically secured as well depending on how enthusiastic the students are at wanting to subvert the security.

2) Many apps don't run well or at all on a properly secured Windows. Ubuntu's Unix like base means apps are designed to expect a rights restricted environment so it's much less painful.

#2 Is actually Vista's largest problem. Vista is trying to force good application software design that runs against years of experience in the Windows world and it's going to take a long time for app makers to adjust to the new reality.