What's behind Microsoft's fall from dominance?

[nicholas]

You can take my silence as having a life outside here.

Sure.

More like you talked a load of bollox as usual, don't let silly little things like facts get in the way though.

[nicholas]

ou don't believe I have been out all day and have just returned? You have serious mental health issues.

I believe that you are an arrogant prick who is unable to respond to his lies being corrected by facts without restoring to ad-hominem attacks to deflect from his own obvious failings.

Please don't speak to me again.

[nicholas]

Good, hopefully that means you won't start trolling or insulting me again.

Reading comprehension doesn't seem to be your strong point, my request was quite clear and correcting your lies is not trolling kid.
 

All I got to do now is stop commodorejohn from doing the same and this place will be good again.

This place was great before people like you came along in the last three years or so.

Don't waste your time replying as i will be blocking your posts from being visible to me from now on.

[nicholas]

No, please, don't force me to read 9 pages of discussions just to understand how the topic turned from "what's behind Microsoft's fall from dominance" and "the right to play back a DVD should be included when buy the DVD and playback should not be restrictred by software patents". It would be overkill ;-)

Anyway, back to original topic, I don't think there's a fall from dominance by Microsoft. It just happens that a NEW market, different than PC ones, has born in the meanwhile, and Microsoft didn't pay enough attention to its future relevance. Result is that Microsoft is still absolutely dominant in the PC *and* server market, although in the new, different MOBILE market its competition to Google and Apple has just begun. I wouldn't underestimate Microsoft here, though: I already know some people switching from iOS to Android to Windows Phone, and all of them agree the last one is the stablest among the three. This trend may diffuse if vendors of Android phones won't stop kidding with customers and decide to upgrade their products in a better way. Microsoft also bought Nokia, which in the past was the best seller competitor in the cellphone market, so they have all the know-how they need to succeed again. In a nutshell: Microsoft's fortunes might have been built on questionable marketing behaviors in the past, but they had many success stories and made many mistakes to learn from. I wouldn't bet Google and Apple share the same valuable experiences, even if they had a glorious histery behind them.

All in all, we're still at the beginning of a new era, and it's good to see all that competition that was just driven out from the computer market long ago. It will bring customers better products after all.

I don't know what industry you are in but MS is *far* from being dominant in the server space it's not even close.

UNIX-oids are by far the most used overall except for niche markets that are by definition tied to Windows like .NET etc.

[nicholas]

I know it was the old Oracle worries but splitting the effort across two office suites was really not smart.  Apache's Open Office and Free Software Foundations LibreOffice are based on the same buggy code and now they have double the work to fix it.

The majority of Linux distros (the ones with some actual market share) all switched to LibreOffice as did most of the active OpenOffice developers.

OpenOffice is basically irrelevent these days and has gone to the graveyard of abandoned Free Software projects that is the Apache Foundation.

[nicholas]

Nah, not true. It's something a lot of computer enthusiasts will try to sell these days, but its not accurate.

I'm not a "computer enthusiast", i'm quite literally an old pro who started his professional development career in the mid 90's so i'd like to think my opinions are based on more than wishful thinking.

BHP, Telstra, Optus, Compaq, etc. are hardly niche markets

I could name bigger companies that are strictly *nix on the server but it wouldnt convince you i fear.

[nicholas]

The italian subsidiary of IBM.



Among the 10000+ servers I can have access to, here: 850 use Linux (mainly SUSE, Red Hat and a few others), about 2600 use another UNIX dialect (counting Solaris, MVS, AS/400 and others), about 650 are physical VMware hosts (ESX/ESXi, any version), and all the rest are Windows machines. Which means 70% of servers hosted here are Windows (and not unixes) machines. You may argue that all over the world the situation may be different, but I can assure you it's a good sample of the whole server universe. Little industries that can't afford hosting in the farms of a great IT company and prefer keeping their machines in-house generally choose Microsoft too, because it offer robust integrated solutions for the web (IIS), for email (Exchange), and there's a pletora of 3rd party products that can work aside or together with them, with the relative ease of use of Windows. The myth of the server world using 99% Linux has never been true and it's extremely far from the actual situation.

Who said Linux?

In the world of large RDBMS and cluster farms UNIX (And I include Linux and the BSD's in that too) is and always has been king. MS made inroads certainly but it is not even close to being dominant as you claim.

AS/400 is no UNIX either. You work for IBM?!?