Microsoft Made Many Shocking Linux & Open-Source Announcements This Year

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

In US maybe. Fortunately, the rest of the world is not USA.

I meant mostly in terms of performance, useability. Not popularity. And, thanks for assuming I live in the US, because, I don't.

[chithanh]

Apopas Yep, I have been scratching my head for a long time about the staged launch of the Xbone. It was claimed to be some kind of localization issue, but the exact nature of the holdup was not disclosed.

Translation? Can't be, they launched in Germany, France and Italy but not at the same time in Switzerland.
Voice commands? Talking to Kinect didn't work at official launch time in many tier 2 countries either.
Local content? Also not, when they launched in the Netherlands, Sweden, etc. there was no new local content to speak of. Besides, 360 was already on sale so they had contracts with the media companies in place.

But then it dawned on me, it must have been their Xbox network which was not yet ready in these countries. At least not for those projected billion users.

[Luke_Wolf]

What does that even prove? That traditional AAA gaming isn't "dead"? Sure, but the sales trajectories show that this is no longer a growth market.
This is in stark contrast to mobile games which make up around 75% of app store revenues (pretty constant share for years). Just put that into perspective with the hockey stick growth of these app stores, and you too will see the writing on the wall.

That's not a traditional AAA game, that's a crowd funded indie game that has raised over $100 million, and is the poster child of the growth of the larger PC gaming market. The reality is that the PC gaming market is booming, and let me remind you.. first they said that consoles would make PCs irrelevant, then they said that Palm Pilots would make PCs irrelevant, then they said that the smartphone would surely be the one to make the PC irrelevant, then it was the cloud, and then the Tablet.

The reality is that while PC sales have stagnated and mobile sales have boomed that has entirely to do with the fact that PCs are a mature market where performance has been "good enough" for most people since the days of the Core 2 series, meanwhile mobile space has the same kind of churning going on that was going on in PC sphere in the 90s where you effectively need to upgrade every year or two, my Nexus 7 2012 for example still very much works, but it is almost unusable at times because of how slow it is (like if it's negotiating a wifi connection I have to wait for it to finish before I can interact with it). Which is to say a 3 year old device that needs to be replaced with something new because it has performance problems. As performance passes the critical threshold upgrade cycles will begin to slow and sales will resultingly drop and smooth out just as PC sales have. The key takeaway from this is that your graph there represents mobiles being replaced every year or two vs PCs that are replaced every 4-5 years in most cases.

Further you're pretty much one of the last people still spouting this garbage, all of the related pundits have shut up about it for over a year or two now. The PC is more alive than ever and very much so revelant.

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

At least not for those projected billion users.

Hadn't seen that one yet; lol @ Microsoft there, can't help but agree. Overly bold predictions on their part indeed.

[andreano]

Embrace Extend Extinguish

This time, I think it's more a Developers, developers, developers, developers tactic than ever.

[andreano]

The beautiful truth is that open source, especially of the GPL variety, is basically immune from such tactics. If MS tried that against linux or even openssh, it would hurt no one except MS, and they know that. They may be evil, but they are not stupid.

I much prefer MS to profit from open source than from proprietary, locked down, spyware laden closed source.

Couldn't have said it better. They are probably looking at Apple, which has proven that open source friendliness and contribution (Webkit, embracing HTML5, LLVM, …) is no hinder for being as evil as usual and making huge profits. Okay, the Webkit story is a bit EEE, but hey, it's still GPL/BSD licensed, so they did well.

[chithanh]

The reality is that the PC gaming market is booming, and let me remind you.. first they said that consoles would make PCs irrelevant, then they said that Palm Pilots would make PCs irrelevant, then they said that the smartphone would surely be the one to make the PC irrelevant, then it was the cloud, and then the Tablet.

I don't know who "they", are but it was certainly not me who claimed that Palm or consoles would make the PC irrelevant.

Just look at the sales trajectories, and the following uses a rather conservative estimate about mobile gaming sales (others are already at 25+ billion USD in 2014)


Source: https://opengamingalliance.org/press...h-for-pc-games

The reality is that while PC sales have stagnated and mobile sales have boomed that has entirely to do with the fact that PCs are a mature market where performance has been "good enough" for most people since the days of the Core 2 series

PCs have been around since the 80s, they have been growing ever since. Only when smartphones became popular, they ate into the PC market, causing it to stall and now decline. Look again at the graph I have posted earlier in the thread:

Source: http://www.asymco.com/2015/04/14/personal-computer/

See the years 2010-2012, when Apple (and of course the rest of the smartphone market too) saw mind-boggling growth? That are the years when the PC market peaked. This is not a coincidence.

I'll tell you why people don't buy PCs in numbers any more. They are increasingly using their smartphones and tablets for their computing needs now. Whether the PC performs well doesn't matter, they only boot it up every once in a while to do something that can't yet be done with the other devices.

And guess what happens if you boot your PC once every couple of weeks: Operating system and applications will install updates, bringing the system down to a crawl and making it an even less pleasant experience that it already was, causing people to avoid it even more.

As performance passes the critical threshold upgrade cycles will begin to slow and sales will resultingly drop and smooth out just as PC sales have. The key takeaway from this is that your graph there represents mobiles being replaced every year or two vs PCs that are replaced every 4-5 years in most cases.

The upgrade cycle of smartphones is not only driven by performance. It is very much driven by the mobile carriers, especially in countries where subsidized phones on contract are popular.
Part of it is also driven by hype (e.g. people who need the latest Apple iPhone every year). This has to do with the fact that smartphones are lifestyle items now, something the PC (except Mac) never achieved.

Further you're pretty much one of the last people still spouting this garbage, all of the related pundits have shut up about it for over a year or two now. The PC is more alive than ever and very much so revelant.

I never contested the idea that the PC is "alive". You made that strawman up to support your pitiful argument.
I also never said that the PC is irrelevant. I said that it is becoming irrelevant.