Re: Falling Windows Market Share

On Tue, 6/24/2025 6:20 PM, % wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

Ed Bott
<https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-million-windows-pcs-vanished-in-3-years-where-did-they-all-go/>
has noticed an interesting signal in among all the noise of
Microsoft’s PR boasts: the installed base of Microsoft Windows has
been shrinking, and quite substantially.
>
As recently as 3 years ago, Microsoft trumpeted an installed base of
1.4 billion Windows PCs; but the best it can say today is “over a
billion”.
>
So somewhere around 300 million machines have disappeared from that
count in that period. Were they all retired? Or were a few of them
switched to some other OS?
>

and you believe that

If we were sitting in the boardroom in Redmond, there
was never an intention to keep everyone or anyone.

Some years ago, it was remarked that it was the "end of desktops",
and everyone would have a kink in their neck from using a SmartPhone.

But since Microsoft was unceremoniously booted from the SmartPhone
market (the consolidation problem), they have to walk uphill
to school and walk uphill to get back home at the end of the day.
They have to promote desktops now, as part of a sales pitch.

Nothing to see here, move along.

High tech companies have always been a crap-shoot. IBM is a survivor,
but it's trajectory, it's exposure, are not good. AMD is one of the
most amazing companies, they're like the Flying Walendas. But
generally speaking, high tech companies don't last.

Microsoft still has a pile of cash, and there's no chance of
it just disappearing, without some articles from ZDNET
predicting their demise. If staff didn't want to work there any more
(like the Meta AI issue), then, there would be a problem.

I don't make my purchase decisions, based on others.
I'm not a crowd-joiner. For example, I don't
own a SmartPhone. Shocking.

If you present an article with a line-goes-up for
Smartphones, this is my dont-care face.

If someone offered a laptop for $39, would I buy it ?
That's a solid NO.

   Paul