The Slow Death of Windows

Windows is dying very

slow

ly and is still the market leader, but it has been losing share for almost 15 years, dropping from 95% to 60% worldwide, while Mac OS is now holding steady with over 20% share of use and even Chrome OS. and desktop Linux sit comfortably above 3%, each even worse in less price-sensitive markets like the US, consumer preference for Apple is even stronger, with over 30% of the consumers. They now use a Mac and all of this change occurred while the PC market as a whole began to decline too much, aside from a temporary spike driven by the pandemic-era work-from-home boom, PCS sales have been declining constantly since 2011;

In other words, Microsoft's operating system has a shrinking share of a declining market, so where did they drop the bow and how? Are they planning to change things? Can the recently announced Snapdragon chip or maybe the big bet on AI really saved them? Let's find out that this video was sponsored by a microphone mod, the wireless magnetic microphone to level up your audio in 2010, Steven Sinowski, then the director. Windows saw Steve Jobs reveal the company's third big product, the iPad, his initial reaction was confusion, as he admitted on his blog that Microsoft leaders expected to see a tablet at the event, but thought it would be a tablet.

Mac OS focused on a digital stylist that cost at least $1,000 similar to a MacBook Air back then, the iPad was none of those things that put serious doubts on Microsoft at the time of this announcement, Windows was actually a better deal than ever due to the successful launch of Windows 7. Windows alone generated over $18 billion in revenue in 2010 with an incredible 70% operating margins, meaning it was more profitable than all of Apple combined. Windows was an incredible profit-generating machine in its heyday, but despite this, as Microsoft became more insecure about the future of computing and its role in it, the company was clearly losing the smartphone race it was threatening to overtake. overtake PCS as the primary computing platforms for people, while even on PCS most of the new innovative applications were no longer built around some Windows application framework, but rather as web applications running on almost any platform and now here was Apple claiming they invented the next big form factor and Sinowski on his blog called this moment Microsoft's Blackberry, implying they were the dinosaurs before the asteroid impact unless they radically reinvented it. would eventually be relegated to the past, and since at the time all of Microsoft's major businesses, from Office to MSN and more, were tied to the success of Windows, the risk that that simply wasn't an option, over the next decade, Microsoft tried They tried hard to reinvent Windows, but not only did they fail, their attempts to reinvent the wheel actually made things worse by creating a consistent four-step pattern.

Step one. New technology like the iPad looks like things from Microsoft have the potential to become the future of computing. Step two. Microsoft that feels. that Windows is falling behind decides to do everything it can to rebuild its operating system to compete against this new entry, in the case of the iPad this was done by turning the entire operating system into an almost tablet-like interface that locks users into applications full screen, etc., but then step three, the transition actually fails. Converting a desktop operating system to a tablet is very difficult, plus Microsoft has to accelerate this transition and its partners take a long time to adapt.

Intel never made a chip that could compete in tablets, and it took a long time for app developers to adapt. Move your apps to Microsoft's touch UI as well so the whole project falls apart and meanwhile, in step four, the radical changes actually end up annoying regular Windows users who just want to continue using their PC as PC, so all this new stuff just comes in the way and eventually Windows has to be booted again, so at the end of this four-step cycle, Microsoft spent years working on something that not only didn't improve Windows to long term, but often made it worse later as it progressed. a big push leaves behind a lot of things that eventually become random.

Inherited inflation. I think Windows 8 was kind of the original sin here, the first iteration of this terrible cycle, but then for the next decade Microsoft kept repeating it over and over again. Here are some. examples, step one Virtual reality becomes a thing with oculus and HTC VI Microsoft thinks this could become a big problem, so step two Microsoft goes all-in on mixed reality and makes Windows 10 capable of running a Hol lens, a futuristic AR headset and all Windows. The PC version has a mixed reality platform built in, just plug in a compatible headset and it works, and not only does Windows become 3D, it also paints 3D launchers so users can create and explore 3D objects, all Office apps have 3D capabilities and even Microsoft's default app framework gets a 3D redesign, which means glass-like textures, 3D shadows, and a glowing cursor similar to how VR controllers highlight where you're pointing, because they're supposed to. all your desktop apps should also be rendered in mixed reality as a sort of 3D. objects too step three Windows mixed reality basically fails.

I mean, personally, I thought their VR headsets worked great, plus the Hol Lens still technically exists, but the vast majority of the world doesn't need Windows to be a mixed reality OS. Step Four Microsoft spends years ripping out as much of this 3D and real-life mixed stuff as possible from Windows and leaving the rest that it can't remove because it's basically bloat, the cycle is complete and here comes the next step: Chrome OS starts to become popular among Enterprise. and educational consumers because it is lightweight and easy to keep secure, so step two Microsoft reacts by creating Windows 10, a version of Windows that only allows users to install applications that Microsoft declares to be safe and, to prove that they are going seriously, they even ship them by default on some Surface devices, the third step is a complete failure.

The 10 can't compete with Chrome OS on low-end hardware because it still has full

windows

under its edge. The browser is also inferior to Chrome and confuses users who bought a Surface at random by telling them that they can't install their usual apps on their new computer. Step four after just one year. Microsoft kills the operating system and has to undo everything, leaving it only as an optional switch for business users that almost none of them still use. Okay, ready for one last example step one foldables become an interesting new category step two Microsoft builds the Surface Neo and creates a massive rewrite of its operating system called Windows 10x for dual-screen devices step three this flop the system Operating Rush Intel chips still stink thin and light devices more than a decade after the iPad's release, and app developers' interest in dual-screen form factors in Windows is basically nonexistent.

Step Four Microsoft completely discards the operating system and hardware before even releasing at least part of the design. from 10x actually carries over to become Windows 11 on regular PCS, but most of the work behind the project is basically wasted. I could go on with examples, but I think the pattern is blindingly obvious once you see it. Microsoft for about a decade has been trying and failing to turn Windows into something entirely new, a tablet operating system, an operating system. mixed reality, a dual-screen operating system, a Chrome OS competitor, etc., and they were going around in circles while doing and undoing each of these, meanwhile, their competitors.

They just quietly worked to get better at mostly computer stuff and could spend their resources, for example, on building better chips for their computers. This is not to say that there have not been important improvements in Windows in all this time, of course there have been. but in this light, I'm surprised they haven't lost more share than they have and it shows how sticky the platforms can be now. Windows 11. I think it is the first version of Windows since 2009 that really breaks this pattern that this version has. didn't introduce any new computing paradigms, but T has primarily focused on refining the actual core PC experience, this includes cleaning up decades of old UI inconsistencies on the desktop, such as old context menus, and cleaning up the Settings app. of the system.

It includes an overall visual revamp of the operating system and includes finally bringing new core features to inbox apps and file explorer get tabs, notepad, auto save snipping tool, be able to record videos, paint, get layers and finding, finally, being able to handle transparent images etc., these are all very obvious desktop improvements. which Microsoft should have built a decade ago, but finally got to Windows 11. I think this acceptance is a factor why the rest of Microsoft is completely overtaking Windows and that means the company no longer has to try to make this poor operating system takes the The entire organization moves forward on its own, but now that the focus is again, the next question is whether Windows can really regain some of the market share it has lost and I think that for that they must first solve two things concrete: the chips, since 2020 M series chips based on Apple's own designed arms gave it a huge power efficiency and performance advantage, especially in thin and light laptops, these incredible chips have contributed, at least in part, to the rapid rise of Mac os in places like the US, so Windows needs to at least pair them up if they want to stop the bleeding, maybe Intel and AMD will step up to do that task , but the latest hope is that arm chips will work for Windows just like they did for Macos, except on Windows we might get some. real competition here first Qualcomm just announced their new Snapdragon X Series chips in Hawaii and they claimed that these are exactly the chips that Windows laptops especially have been waiting for.

The CPUs are designed by many of the same people who designed Apple's M-series chips. They are a custom arm based design just like the M series and Qualcomm showed a number of benchmarks at their event where they beat everyone from Apple to Intel and also in performance and power efficiency, now we will have to wait for that third party testing. Let's see if these selected benchmarks actually hold up, but this is at least a promising option and while Qualcomm had an exclusive deal with Microsoft for ARM chips, that deal looks set to expire any day now and we're already getting rumors that Nvidia and AMD is also planning to make ARM-based Windows chips.

Mediatech has already started working on its PC chips, including apparently some that can be paired with a dedicated Nvidia F graphics card, and I see no reason why Samsung and Huawei, for example, wouldn't. At least consider this too when Windows could basically only run on x86 chips, which meant only Intel and AMD could make processors for Windows. Those are the only two companies that have the licenses for it, but basically anyone can make Arm chips, so I hope there will be real competition soon, and while the chips will hopefully figure themselves out, Microsoft also needs to make sure of figuring out how to make the operating system and especially the apps work better on Windows on Arm because, especially in the beginning, the software side has been pretty unimpressive to see how far Windows on Arm has come as a platform so far.

In fact, I asked Lenovo to send me their latest Snapdragon 8cx gen 3 powered PC ahead of the Qualcomm event and here are my thoughts on the platform on the positive side of this. The chip and the ThinkPad give me the same incredible 8-12 hour real-world battery life and the same completely cool fanless ultra-thin and light experience as my M1 MacBook Air, and while the raw performance can't exactly match the mechanism , the system itself and most of the apps were really super responsive. I even got the same generative AI features in Photoshop, forFor example, which I got in the Mac because this Snapdragon chip has a dedicated NPU or AI processor on board, just like the Mac, so it's significantly better.

Baseline than I expected, but 6 years on Windows on Arm still has a major issue with the app. Here is a list of apps I tried to run on the platform and they fall into four categories. The best ones are compiled natively for Arm. They run basically flawlessly. I use a lot of these apps basically daily, so for me this is a surprisingly decent selection. The following are apps like slack Discord and notion that don't have a native ARM version, but since their desktop apps are basically websites pretending to be apps, you can save them anyway. their web versions as Microsoft Edge apps and you probably won't even notice the difference, they work great.

Type three are applications that can only run in emulation. Technically they work and I am very happy that many of them are here because there are. There are no easy alternatives for them in some cases, but they are a little less responsive than native ones. I find this performance to be completely acceptable for simple apps like the Signal desktop app or perhaps Audacity, but more complex apps like Chrome just aren't enjoyable long-term and typing. Four are the really complex applications that require specific hardware optimizations, like many video editing programs or intensive games, which often simply don't run at all.

Hey, editing Mar, while I was working on this video, news came out that Blackmagic's da Vinci resolution is. Before, you basically couldn't even open the app on Windows on Arm, so I think this is a good sign that at At least some of the largest app makers are adopting Windows on Arm. platform a little more seriously now that we have better and more powerful Snapdragon chips etc., fingers crossed that we will have better support soon, okay, and now back to the rest of the video, now there are tons of rumors and job offers that hint at next year.

Windows 12 is all about improving arm support, but for now there are still too many trade-offs for this to be a truly mass-market platform, but the direction is good and if you can make it good enough, then Windows along with better chips They might prevent many people from moving away from Windows, but other than that, Microsoft. You'd also have to find a compelling reason to get people back to Windows 2 and for now they seem pretty convinced it will be AI features. They have already advanced their plans to put AI into every corner of the operating system, every app and every service that has AI is their next big thing and for once I think they might be well prepared to succeed with it, unlike other tech trends, Microsoft is actually a bit ahead of the curve with AI and isn't rushing to catch up. with a competitor, they are the largest shareholder of open AI with 49% and have exclusive access to its products.

They have already created multiple successful AI applications, such as GitHub Co-Pilot, which millions of people use daily. They have more productivity applications and services. from office to VSS code and more, everyone would definitely benefit from AI integrations if done right and for once I think all these AI features are a trend that actually makes sense to integrate into the PC platform, people naturally turn to their PCS to do this. a lot of creative work, writing, coding, data processing, etc., so having AI help with these tasks could make a lot of sense. Will AI be a big problem for Windows?

I don't know, but I guess it has a better chance of succeeding than Windows. on a tablet operating system, so that's a start, let me know in the comments if you think you have a chance, but before that I have a little secret to share throughout this video, the whole voiceover part that you have been listening was recorded with this. Really unique microphone called mod microphone. This is a wireless microphone that you can magnetically attach to almost any pair of headphones to sound amazing. Simply stick one of the four stickers that comes in the box on your headphones and then plug in your USB. receiver on your computer and bada bada boom high-quality audio for your Zoom calls and gaming sessions, of course, for the voiceover part, I applied some processing to the audio like I do with any microphone here at the studio, this is what this microphone sounds like. like without any processing applied and by the way you might hear I'm still a little sick, that's in my voice too, but I bet for the most part, I guess most of you didn't realize I was I don't use my usual studio microphones in this video, in addition to the sound quality, you also get 12 hours of battery life, a dedicated mute button, and a super high quality Bluetooth connection.

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