The latest article-du-jour making the rounds on the Internet is a well-written article by John Gruber titled, “Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline”. (Check out his working title 
)
Sensational headline for sure, and although some don’t agree with him, I actually agree with a lot of what he says.
IMO, as much as Redmond doesn’t want to admit it, the Windows franchise is facing it’s biggest challenge in years.
No doubt the economy has something to do with it (although Gruber dismisses that argument), and no doubt the Mac is a pretty product. The prevalence and acceptance of cloud services today also de-emphasizes the operating system to some degree. And the theory that Apple controls 91% of the revenue share for computes costing $1000+ (according to NPD) spells doom for the Windows business is also plausible (or not).
I agree with Gruber that Windows 7, as much acclaim that it has garnered, will probably not convince a Mac user to go back to Windows (Technologizer doesn’t think it matters). WinExtra sees Windows 7 as a fresh start for Microsoft. I agree, and that is a good starting point for us to use to measure the success of Windows 7 in the upcoming years.
But considering everything, it’s not a surprise to me that the Windows business saw a 29% year-on-year decline this year. This is also why I think Microsoft did the wise thing years ago and diversified into enterprise, search, online services, productivity tools, mobile, gaming, cloud computing and so forth instead of putting all their eggs in the desktop PC basket. Regardless of what happens to Windows on the consumer desktop, I believe this diversification will help Microsoft remain strong.
And Microsoft, while chasing competitors Google and Apple in certain segments, does have a history of innovation and creating great products. I agree with MG Siegler. Innovate and make the best products, and everything else will fall into place.
Anyway, back to the Daring Fireball article. Gruber writes:
Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.
This is where I totally don’t agree with him.
I consider myself a computer enthusiast since my middle school days, and someone who consciously chose computers as his career. As a computer enthusiast, I want to have full end-to-end control over the entire computing experience, from hardware to operating system to software. And I believe many computer enthusiasts agree with me.
IMO, the PC and Windows ecosystems are unparalleled as far as the flexibility and versatility they provide computer enthusiasts like myself to control the end-to-end computing experience. This is something that I believe a Mac can never provide, at least not under Apple’s current philosophy of controlling the product as much as possible.
The PC ecosystem is a vibrant community of multiple vendors supplying every single imaginable hardware part available for you to build your own PC exactly as you wish. I believe Windows has the biggest ecosystem of software applications, hacks, and utilities of any operating system today. Need to perform a certain task? To borrow a marketing phrase from Apple, there is an app for that on the PC.
I don’t think computer enthusiasts are necessarily the ones attracted to Macs. Instead, I believe Macs appeal to the power users who want a stylish machine and don’t want to go through a lot of hassle to get a good user experience out-of-the-box. I have seen many of my friends use Macs before. While the user experience is stunning, I can’t help but feel that everyone’s experience seems very… similar.
As a computer enthusiast, I like my computing experience to be unique, customizable, and more importantly, fully under my control.
That’s why I am extremely bullish on the Firefox browser, because of it’s huge library of add-ons.
That’s why I applaud Microsoft introducing web slices and accelerators in Internet Explorer 8, as easy ways to customize and extend the browsing experience.
That’s why I support jailbreaking iPhones.
And that is why I don’t see myself giving up on the PC/Windows platform anytime soon. Even if I do get a Mac in the future, it will be an auxiliary machine, and likely won’t supplant my main workstation.
(This is the kind of post where you need to make sure you read my full disclosure on my About page.)
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28 Comments
I have to agree with the others above. Windows is a closed, inflexible system with limited ability to be customized or have things added onto them, particularly by the enthusiast. Any *nix application contains far more opportunities to configure than any Windows app which leads me to believe that Macs would be the same, though I’ve never owned one.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, but I really was just comparing PCs/Windows and Macs/OS X, which was the context of Daring Fireball’s article.
Basically, the two most popular consumer desktop OSes.
Great site, I now have you bookmarked to come back again.
Hi, i’ve been following your interesting blog for a few months now and find it very interesting!
this time last year, i would have totally agreed with your article. I was a huge PC supporter, and would echo your thoughts. However this year, i thought i would “try a mac” and after 1 month, i really was impressed. now i still have a pc in the house and prefer it to it being my HTPC, however i would prefer a mac on most of my everyday tasks. i would consider myself an enthusiast, and would recommend that the best way to really evaluate the whole mac vs pc is to try both and decide. Both have their strengths, but currently i find the mac having more.
just my thoughts
Thanks Dev, for both your complements and your comment.
I agree. Ultimately, everyone should go ahead and try it for themselves and decide for themselves what platform suits them better. All we can really do is offer our own opinions and experiences as a reference.
Personally for me – operating system aside, I have that itch every year or so to build and tweak my own hardware. And unfortunately (or fortunately), that itch can only be scratched by PCs for now.
“Basically, the two most popular consumer desktop OSes.”
It would seem that Microsoft internal analysis would disagree with you there.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple
“IMO, the PC and Windows ecosystems are unparalleled as far as the flexibility and versatility they provide computer enthusiasts like myself to control the end-to-end computing experience”
After using Linux for a few months, going back to Windows really feels like having your wings clipped. When I help family and friends liberate their computers they are usually a bit wary at first but after a week or so they can’t imagine going back.
The three killer features I find people comment on most after using it for a while are no viruses, multiple virtual workspaces and package management (it is probably in the repository, if not there is an rpm/deb package for anything you need). For non IT workers, it apparently feels like you are in control, instead of hackers/crackers/virus writers and they don’t have to fear when browsing the net any more.
Interesting.
I’m actually curious how much of the Linux share number is for business desktops, and how much of it is for consumer desktops, since the chart in the story you linked seems to imply a combined number.
For Macs, I would think the share number is almost exclusively for consumer desktops.
Jon,
Have to disagree with you on this. In fact, most of the post. I feel that you haven’t really used Mac OS X before (I could be wrong), otherwise you wouldn’t have such perceptions. I am a programmer, have been a programmer all of my career. I used PC for most of the time until 3 – 4 years back when I switched over to OS X. The OS X is a much better programmer’s OS in most aspects. The only thing I missed were Visio and MS Project and neither were really programmer tools, and I have found better replacements for them.
About 6 years ago when I attended JavaOne event in SF (and was still very much a PC guy), I was amazed that almost 1 out of 3 programmers attending the event ran on OS X (I kept count of people who had laptops out). When I was in Yahoo running an engineering team, almost 100% of my team (mostly programmers) were on OS X. You could say it is specific to my team, but I was in Sunnyvale, London and Bangalore offices and more than 50% of the engineering people I met were using OS X as well. Maybe it’s Yahoo, but then half my programmer friends (not from Yahoo) use OS X as well. Was it vanity, Apple branding magic at work? I don’t think so, I think it’s just a better programmer’s OS.
Perhaps it’s a specific developer environment that attracted programmers to OS X, maybe other types of computer enthusiasts do prefer PCs like you say but I don’t see any concrete evidence of this. On the other hand at least for programmers like me (maybe it’s the platforms I use?) I see people everywhere using OS X (where people are not using OS X I see people using Linux variants). So for me it’s cold hard evidence win for OS X.
BTW I disagree with your other points on flexibility, customizable, total control etc but I suppose someone else would give you a nice refute somewhere along this thread. Just wanted to share my own experience.
Thanks for the share. Always appreciate other point of views.
You are right that I am limited in my experience with Macs, although I do try to play around with every one of my friends’ Macs that I come across. Albeit every exposure is of a limited time, I just don’t feel comfortable with it.
I share your observation in the sense that it seems that OS X is the preferred programming tool of choice for many programmers. But I’ll qualify – mostly PHP, Java, or other open source programmers. Why is that? What’s so attractive about OS X as a desktop operating system that makes it a draw for programmers to develop on?
However, we need to also recognize that Computer Enthusiast != Programmer, or at least not all of them.
I still stand by my assertion that if a Computer Enthusiast is looking for a computing experience spanning hardware and software that offers the most flexibility, between the PC/Windows ecosystem and the Apple ecosystem, the former is still my choice.
I think that is your limited experience talking. As a Computer Enthusiast looking for a computing experience spanning hardware and software that offers the most flexibility you can’t go past anything/Linux. With an open OS, Mac hardware simply becomes an expensive subset of PC hardware and is also a very good platform for running Linux.
@Anonymous Coward
Again, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, but I really was just comparing PCs/Windows and Macs/OS X, which was the context of Daring Fireball’s article.
And as far as the number of ready-made third-party applications which I can find and install on the OS? I don’t think the Linux ecosystem (or OS X, for the matter) has more to offer than what Windows does.
“Again, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, but I really was just comparing PCs/Windows and Macs/OS X”
Understood. Between a snail and a turtle, the turtle is the fastest animal on the planet.
Windows may have more ready made 3rd party applications, but ready made useful and trustworthy 3rd party applications are a different matter. Many major software player are playing ball now. Adobe has its own official yum repository for flash and acrobat now so they can be updated as part of a normal system update and you would be surprised how many applications there are in the official repository let alone 3rd party repos like rpm fusion or the ubuntu multiverse repos.
My point of view, lets embrace the best of 3 world. Windows, Mac & Linux all together. Thus, i fully support the (although it is illegal) http://www.osx86project.org/. This is the kind of hobby that a computer enthusiast would definitely tryout. Also seems like our apple friend have done the same thing (the friendly little bootcamp). Btw, i am also PC but i love Mac too (Linux have my full support too).
Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
Mac OS X falls under the *nix category. From the terminal you can explore under the surface of the system in all of its configurable *nixy glory. These days operating systems are either Windows or *nix
That’s pretty cool!
Moderator, do not approve, just delete. Testing how blockquote looks on comments, on Vigilance.
Thanks!
Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?
About the blockquotes on the comments (sorry it is unrelated to the weblog entry itself), I find it problematic. I wish there was an easy way to change the way to style blockquotes on comments differently from the blockquotes used on posts or site in general. Do you know a way to accomplish it?
If you are a blog owner you can possibly hack the WordPress theme PHP files so that blockquotes in comments use a different CSS style than blockquotes in the blog entry itself.
As a comment writer, I suppose if you want to you can use inline styles to style your blockquotes.
Something like…
I am sure there is a way to do it, without ‘hacking’ the PHP files, all through CSS. Adding styles to a comment would be a way, but I tried and the main blockquote style always took over and have not figured out a way to overwrite it with one on comments (not using style, but a class).
Also, if you reply to this comment, do you notice the textarea box overflowing to the right? That also happen on my development install (http://dev.collantes.us/). Another thing I noticed on my test install, that it doesn’t happen on yours is the alignment of the gravatar with the comment text. Yours is perfectly aligned, while mine (see here) breaks. Got any tips?
@David
Yeah, I actually had to fix the default CSS styles in Vigilance to support nested comments deeper than 2 levels. See my master.css file to see the changes I made.
As for the blockquote issue and the text box overflowing… yeah, that’s a problem but not sure how to fix it.
Thank you for your help. I mistakingly added code on my previous post. Please fix it for me? Thanks again, you won yourself a permanent reader!
I see you got OpenID plugin running here. How is it working for you?
Very well.
I find that, each time I post a comment, it will go back to my OpenID provider, and return me here. It should do that only once, then no more. There is a problem with it. Would it be OK if I provide this link to Will Norris (one of the WP-OpenID creators), so he can see what I am talking about? Thanks again!
Sure thing.
i just started running windows 7 and i love it, i think windows is back to making fast stable stuff and i think they made the right choice here.
@David
Yeah, I actually had to fix the default CSS styles in Vigilance to support nested comments deeper than 2 levels. See my master.css file to see the changes I made.
As for the blockquote issue and the text box overflowing… yeah, that’s a problem but not sure how to fix it.