Microsoft will be saved by open-source

Statistics, you gotta love them. 11% of what users? Code developers? Office workers? Art designers? Of that global pie, how many are in the USA and how many elsewhere?
Mrk

 

I can't even imagine trying to use an office program on a device without a keyboard for anything beyond minor editing. Trying to work with a large spreadsheet would be a nightmare.

As for these statistics, the percentage of users means very little. It doesn't reflect what they're using those devices for or what those users think of trying to perform real work on tiny screens or keyboard free systems. It seems like they're pushing devices that handicap the users ability to perform real work or that are only capable of real work when used with cloud based apps. Fortunately none of this affects me. I don't need Win 8, Metro, underpowered portable devices, or cloud computing.

 

Does'nt matter about the percentage its the fact that there are non MS tablets out there and nothing from Microsoft, they were not prepared for iPad.
Of course Microsoft can be competitive and it will take a long time for the traditional desktop to decline (just look how long IE has taken for its share to drop).

 

Seems to me the intent of a lot of vendors is probably to make more functionality subscription based. If you have people paying for use of X software, instead of paying for a copy of it, you can make more money. Less personal computing; more logging on to a servercloud and doing stuff in the command shell remotelydoing stuff with a fancy GUI remotely.

Needless to say I don't call this progress.

 

No one is going to do productive work on a smart phone or tablet. They don't have much use other than as PDA's and glorified note-taking devices. The desktop metaphor will remain with us simply because it works. I don't see the mouse and keyboard disappearing - Whether or not Metro sticks around in the future.

 

A touchscreen for typing? Good luck with it. There is a difference between progress and change just for the sake of change. I see no point in the latter and no real reason for Metro to exist. There is no real market demand for it and Microsoft is trying to create one that doesn't really exist.

 

I'm sure they don't use it for serious office work. The statistic you cited in fact shows why Metro is unneeded. Microsoft is expending a lot of work to capture a market that isn't all that large and profitable to begin with and Apple has a lock on the high end and Linux has a lock on the low end of the smartphone/tablet market. And Microsoft wants to compete with Apple on the high end it owns. Sorry but Metro is dead out of the door with those kind of numbers.

 

Not going to happen. Is there is anything wrong with the "traditional" PC? Not anymore than there's with the car. I doubt anything better will come along in this century.

 

I'm in my late 60's and retired, spend most of my time at home and much of that time on my desktop computer. And having worked for over a quarter-century with keyboard, mouse, and external monitor, I'm darned if I'm gonna switch voluntarily to an OS specifically designed for pads and the like. I have to agree with whoever said we're likely gonna see a repeat of the Vista/XP situation, with MS being required to offer "downgrade"-installations of 7 as a necessary alternative to 8, since sooner or later they'll have to see that 8 in its current form is as big a blunder as Vista was -- or Win 4 or DOS 4 before that.

And for the same reasons as above, I have no use for or any interest in a mobile phone of any kind, let alone a smart-phone. So kindly keep those touchpads well away from me.

 

Term Paper on a tablet: NO
Large Spreadsheet on a tablet: NO
CAD/CAM on a tablet: NO
Software development on a tablet: NO
Photoshop on a tablet: NO
PowerPoint creation on a tablet: NO
Web design on a tablet: NO
CGI development on a tablet: NO

Play funny little games on a tablet: YES
Twitter on a tablet: YES
Post on Facebook with a tablet: YES
Email on a tablet: YES

You can pry my desktop and mouse from my cold dead hands.

 

To be fair, a "desktop" 10 years from now might be a tablet that you plug a mouse, keyboard, and oversized monitor into.

For many end users, I think the desktop may eventually die off as a separate device. However, the role of the desktop is not going to die, because barring some kind of apocalypse, the need to do actual work on a computer is not going to go away.

That said, if I can keep my laptops working for another ten years, I'll be quite happy to keep using them. The cycle of planned obsolesence we're in right now is qutie absurd.

 

Agreed.

The cycle, whilst great for companies making money, also speeds up hardware refreshing and new hardware altogether. Some people would actually like to see what the future holds before they die, rather that "cling to a laptop" for 10 years. I guess that's just me, but I'm glad about the current situation.