Windows will be third placed OS ecosystem by 2017 says Gartner

[abaxas]

Which is exactly what I'm looking forward to!

[edzieba]

People replace their phones a lot more frequently than they replace their computers!

Exactly this. Say, you replace your phone once a year, and replace your PC (requiring a new Windows license) once every 5 years. You need to have phone sales outmatching PC sales at 5:1 just to maintain a steady-state install base!

Raw sales numbers tell you zip about install base without ALSO knowing:
- The current install base
- The EOL rate of each category.

[peterb]

Apple have been very successful in building an infrastructure with near seamless handover from one device to another.

Google have also gone down a similar route, initially with Google Docs, Google Contacts and Google calendar, with the added plus that calendar and docs are not limited to Android devices.

Given the success, it's not surprising to find Microsoft doing the same thing for domestic consumers.

[DanceswithUnix]

Exactly this. Say, you replace your phone once a year, and replace your PC (requiring a new Windows license) once every 5 years. You need to have phone sales outmatching PC sales at 5:1 just to maintain a steady-state install base!

Raw sales numbers tell you zip about install base without ALSO knowing:
- The current install base
- The EOL rate of each category.

I think there are a couple of flaws in that:

1/ Whose fault is it that PCs are fine for 5 years? Where are the new must have features, the innovation, the value for money to make me want a new one?
2/ Phones are good for a few years these days, and I think most people in the UK at least are on a 2 year contract that ties them to a phone for 2 years. Some like me will go SIM only to keep their phone going longer (I got 3 years out of the HTC One-X before I broke it), and while some will upgrade every 6 months to a year those phones get sold on to other people so they aren't EOL just re-used.

So allowing for old phones going on ebay and getting re-used after 2 years of use by the initial user (and I think the replacement battery trade on amazon and ebay show this is a healthy market) I am going to say I expect a phone to last 3 years.

Having to outsell phones 5:3 isn't so impressive a task, and easily explained by the fact that new phones have better processors, sensors, radios, batteries and usability software features than older ones whereas PCs will probably benefit from a graphics card update after a couple of years but otherwise are just stagnant. For that I blame Intel and their obsession with expensive ultrabook machines. They bandy around the word "innovation" but always apply it to things like power consumption that is really not an innovation at all just an expected path of improvement.

OFC if you look at the true innovations that Intel have come up with in the past you get Itanium, Larrabee graphics, the stupidly expensive Thunderbolt that doesn't quite do what people want.

I can't think of anything past M.2 SSD that has happened in the last 5 years, and that isn't enough to force people to upgrade. APUs I will concede are an innovation, but not one I want to pay money for so what is the point.

Sorry for the rant, but I think I needed to get that out of my system

[whatif]

It's not even the marketsize, it's the engagement.

What is amazing is the 'low friction' people have for mobile apps, compared with desktop ones. Something that people wouldn't bother with on a desktop, they would for a mobile device.

I have noticed that. I still only have the standard factory ones on my mobile (Samsung S3), although all my friends have filled their phones with them, most of them they never use or only used a couple of times.

[shaithis]

Servers are dominated by Linux, not Windows, one of the things that makes ARM servers viable. If you look at the support list of past Windows versions, at some point every major and some minor processor has had native Windows support, but it only lasts a few years before Microsoft pull the plug. No-one in their right mind would install Windows onto anything other than AMD64, but thankfully Linux has a good stable support of pretty much everything so servers are fine.

Unless most Windows servers have been replaced by Linux in the last few years, I don't think that's correct. In fact, looking around, I cannot see any real data on the split.

In my ~25 years working in the industry I have yet to work anywhere that has more then a token amount of Linux servers (nearly always web and external DNS), including the University I work at currently. If your running all in-house written apps, I can see it, otherwise I have always found the server OSes to be driven by the application demands of the users....and so many of them still only support Windows back-ends.....more and more will work with Oracle databases but then they normally require a Windows application server and IIS anyway....and that's before we talk about how prevalent apps like Exchange are.

[b0redom]

Really? For me it's the other way around. In the late 90s/early 2000s it was all AIX/Solaris/HP-UX. Now it's all RHEL/CENTOS.

Out of choice I would tend to deploy on *IX as they can be run headless so no CPU cycles being munched by a GUI. That's obviously for platform agnostic services such as JAVA / Web / DB / general services.

[DanceswithUnix]

Unless most Windows servers have been replaced by Linux in the last few years, I don't think that's correct. In fact, looking around, I cannot see any real data on the split.

In my ~25 years working in the industry I have yet to work anywhere that has more then a token amount of Linux servers (nearly always web and external DNS), including the University I work at currently. If your running all in-house written apps, I can see it, otherwise I have always found the server OSes to be driven by the application demands of the users....and so many of them still only support Windows back-ends.....more and more will work with Oracle databases but then they normally require a Windows application server and IIS anyway....and that's before we talk about how prevalent apps like Exchange are.

I think it depends on scale. The really big systems I have used have been IBM Power running AIX (or maybe Linux), because if you have a machine with billions of pounds worth of transactions going through it it is worth dropping a million on the best hardware to make sure it just doesn't ever fall over. Down from there, if you are running some sort of private cloud then the platform of choice seems to be VMware hosting RedHat Enterprise Linux VMs.

Web development is done on LAMP stacks, and if something is presented on the web it doesn't matter what the back end OS is so people I have worked with have chosen Linux.

Google, Amazon and Facebook run Linux clouds.

Even people running hosted Minecraft servers expect to be on a Linux host.

[peterb]

Exactly this. Say, you replace your phone once a year, and replace your PC (requiring a new Windows license) once every 5 years. You need to have phone sales outmatching PC sales at 5:1 just to maintain a steady-state install base!

Raw sales numbers tell you zip about install base without ALSO knowing:
- The current install base
- The EOL rate of each category.

My last phone was six years old when I replaced it, the one before that was 4years old. the one before that was 4years old, the one before that was 6 years old. I expect this one to last at least 4 if not five years.

[crossy]

I think it depends on scale. The really big systems I have used have been IBM Power running AIX (or maybe Linux), because if you have a machine with billions of pounds worth of transactions going through it it is worth dropping a million on the best hardware to make sure it just doesn't ever fall over. Down from there, if you are running some sort of private cloud then the platform of choice seems to be VMware hosting RedHat Enterprise Linux VMs. Web development is done on LAMP stacks, and if something is presented on the web it doesn't matter what the back end OS is so people I have worked with have chosen Linux. Google, Amazon and Facebook run Linux clouds.

That's pretty much my experience too - and I used to work for HP Enterprise Services. Yes, there's a lot of Windows servers out there but to claim that there's only "a token amount of Linux servers" is not something I'm seeing. I'm actually seeing Linux boxes replacing AIX, Solaris, and especially HP/UX boxes, but also some defectors from Windows too. Also seeing moves from IIS to Apache and Tomcat.

Then again I've got a soft spot for the IBM pSeries/System p - as their virtualisation and RAS features make 'em pretty darn near perfect ... if you can afford the "entry fee".

One thing intrigues me though. Microsoft seem to be positioning their non-OS stuff to be more platform neutral. So is that a reaction to the realisation that people ARE moving to Windows Server alternatives, and MS still want a slice of the pie. Or are they doing it so that non Windows people start to consider Microsoft's wares. For example, I'm hearing some good compliments for using C# to do Linux-specific developments, as opposed to using Perl/Python or more usually Java .

[shaithis]

That's pretty much my experience too - and I used to work for HP Enterprise Services. Yes, there's a lot of Windows servers out there but to claim that there's only "a token amount of Linux servers" is not something I'm seeing. I'm actually seeing Linux boxes replacing AIX, Solaris, and especially HP/UX boxes, but also some defectors from Windows too. Also seeing moves from IIS to Apache and Tomcat.

I didn't claim it, I stated that's my experience. And while the places I have worked are not the largest in the world, we are talking about 500-1000 server real-estates.

[DanceswithUnix]

One thing intrigues me though. Microsoft seem to be positioning their non-OS stuff to be more platform neutral. So is that a reaction to the realisation that people ARE moving to Windows Server alternatives, and MS still want a slice of the pie..

I think they are trying to drag people back into the MS eco system.

I believe the plan is something like:

See all that money you are paying for VMware, well a Windows Server license is cheaper and comes with Free HyperV, your RedHat VMs will run fine on it.
Performance isn't quite there? You need SMB3, why not throw out your NAS and use Windows servers for your VM storage.

If enough people fall for the bait, then I expect just like MS did with NT vs Netware the price of HyperV will go through the roof. Or as someone at the time Windows Client License costs shot up said, "they close the door, turn on the gas and start selling gas masks". I hope people can see thorough it this time, but Netware was a long time ago.

[crossy]

I didn't claim it, I stated that's my experience. And while the places I have worked are not the largest in the world, we are talking about 500-1000 server real-estates.

Oops, sorry, picked you up wrong - my bad.

Too busy playing with my 1400+ AIX/Linux boxes...