I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. Asia market was and still is dominated by Microsoft when it comes to desktop.
https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsoft...
Marketshare isn’t everything. You can have outsized mindshare with a tiny market share. You can compete for more than marketshare, too
Android is basically a loss leader for Google ads :-)
Microsoft was shooting for 100% market share and was trying to close every niche keeping Apple alive even if the inertia of all of those business sales meant their total market share was never in question.
And that would make Apple the single largest PC manufacturer.
So if you define a personal computer as a computer people use for personal tasks as a tool, then a mobile phone fits that. In that definition and if you look at all the years history wise, It does look like Nokia have sold the most computers for personal use. At least going by the numbers sold per manufacturer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... and mobiles selling way more than other forms of computers.
It’s sometimes hard to believe how young smart phones (and in fact portable mobile phones in general) are by just how much we now depend on them and take them for granted.
Microsoft invested a grand total of $250 million in Apple. Apple turned around during that same quarter and spent $100 million on Power Computings Mac license. Apple didn’t become profitable until years later. The $150 wouldn’t have saved Apple.
Right but you can differentiate markets.
Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India.
But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro.
Which market do you think they care more about?
I'm also dev in the West and no, it's not even close to being 95% MacBook Pro. Maybe in The Bay Area it's 95% but where I live(Europe) It's mostly Windows 10 + WSL or Ubuntu.
And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Again, Maybe in the Bay Area they are but here nobody cares about what your job is or what expensive laptop you have.
> And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all.
Tech works who influence other tech workers. This is important because if everyone you see speaking at conferences is using a MacBook, and all the software available is for MacBooks, then other people are pushed to use MacBooks.
I can validate this directly as we operate the largest library of long-form professional/technical content library on the web. Over 700k professionals per month are registering and downloading content specific to their needs.
Below is the current breakout of their device factor for 2020:
Windows = 97.26% Mac = 8.21% Linux 2.92% Chrome OS = 0.27%
Clearly just one perspective into the market but we've never seen Mac approach any level of critical mass within the US professional marketplace.
Not in the late 1990s, when Windows XP was being developed.
Well in 2000 there wasn't much computer in China or India.
Of course today that is a lot different. But if Apple's numbers were correct [] then MacBook Pro market share isn't growing, as a matter of fact MBP usage may be shrinking in the West.
[
] For a number of years they claim nearly 50% of Mac buyers are new to the platform. That is nearly 10M per year.Nearly all of the new Mac users are from China.
And yet their reported Active Mac User dont grow any where near as much.
2019 was also the first year in recent history Apple stopped reporting on Mac user satisfaction.
The teen in me, with a Nokia 6600 besides the computer, was in awe when a single installation of Vista Theme Pack and rebooting a couple times meant that everything on my 40GB HDD Pentium computer was changed from the login screen to icons, wallpaper, fonts, shell, file copy boxes, disk space meter, desktop CPU-o-meter dials to a whole modern look.
Something like this shows the diversity in themes:
https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=25
Wayback machine link
https://web.archive.org/web/20040404162223fw_/http://www.kal...
I think resolution-independence has made creating themes much more difficult, and not a lot of people are up to the task.
“Skins” were popular in the windows ecosystem around XP, but it was far from the peak of customization.
It was most definitely peak customization.
Fluxbox itself. Fvwm. Enlightenment. Sawfish.
With fluxbox you had over 1000 themes. And winamp skins worked on xmms.
Also, fvwm was so distinct that you could have tablet like setups before even tablets existed, even with those infamous thumbnail minimizations, but in 2004.
But r/unixporn disagrees about peak amount of customization.
XP theme customizations wasn't even close to what you could do on Unix at the time.
Only if you consider computing is limited to Windows/Mac.
Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ...
/tangentially related rant
Given that, why would they go to the effort or recreating the whole visual appearance. The actual "feel" part was unlikely to be within the scope of the project.
I really miss the windows XP theme. It was super clean and consistent compared to the shit show we have now.
Probably my fav was during the betas before they added the intense blue/green "Luna" theme.
> isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ...
Which I find troublesome with Gnome
Either way, the best way to access everything you can do in Windows 10 is do it via the 'god mode' folder:
1. Create a new folder
2. Rename it to: GodMode.{ed7ba470-8e54-465e-825c-99712043e01c}
3. Open it
Yeah that's the problem, it's not. Microsoft should really be more focused on usability, the whole "i wanna be touch-panel" is just stupid, MS you are a PC! Even Apple said that.
Which one?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/954/660/350...
My favorite though was Windows 2000. Very stable.
Oh gosh, yes. It gets a little bit better if you organize it alphabetically, but then it is alphabetical left to right, top to bottom. It's as if somebody intentionally designed it to be as difficult to scan through as possible.
A lot to be said for the OG windows hook APIs and whatever modern magic they are grabbing into these days.
I loved those themes so much. What a fun way to kill time as a teenager.
[0]: https://www.deviantart.com/rainingskies/art/Windows-Whistler...
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, I'm not entirely convinced this is the deal it's made out to be as there were other companies out there with the same or similar offerings.
Microsoft knew that they wanted the flexibility to be able to do what macOS was doing with theming. But they didn’t have a clear vision of what they were going to use it for. They likely built the theming engine first, and then handed it to their designers to actually come up with a visual identity.
But the new theme engine needed to be tested while it was being built. And what better test, than to see if it can replicate all the things macOS can do that Windows, until then, could not? Probably they considered the theming engine “done” when it reached parity with macOS’s capabilities.
Anecdata:
The 2008 presentation by the guy in charge of the Office Ribbon best demonstrates their organizational blindness. TLDR: They only set out to better organize the complexity, and make it more pretty. They never considered making the underlying products more simple.
One of my classmates worked on Word for ages. One of his subprojects was WordArt. Knowing of my interest in graphics, UI, CADD, he consulted with me. We talked about direct manipulation, affordances, UI flow, etc. Then he went dark. Later, he gave me a preview demo. He was so proud of WordArt. But it was terrible. I was actually angry. To my younger self's credit, I somehow kept my mouth shut and made complimentary grunts. My friend later went on to create EndNote, which wasn't terrible.
One of my early bosses later went on oversee the login and authentication portions of Windows. Whatever that licensing registration step is called. For years. Having been trained as a real world architect (eg buildings, not software), he understood and accepted that he was just putting lipstick on a pig. But the pay was a lot better and he had family, mortgage for a nice house, shorter commute with a newer car. Real world architects don't expect to actually do the work they love and trained for.
(Building) Architecture as a career sucks. There's too many people going into it, and not enough jobs. Getting licensed is currently very onerous. Wages are low unless you're a partner or owner of a firm. When you're a partner or owner, you don't do very much in the way of drawing buildings (which is what people think architecture is like). Architecture is actually mostly managing lots of groups, the client (sometimes also their clients), engineering contractors, building contractors, permitting offices and inspectors, etc.
I mean, how could they, really? Their primary-revenue-source customers are enterprises with established workflows, that want those established workflows to continue to work. These enterprises would be very unhappy if Microsoft changed the "architecture" of how any of their products do anything, or even how automation products (e.g. VBA macros) would have to interact with their products to accomplish things. The only reason these companies stick with Microsoft, rather than switching to a competitor like Google, is that Microsoft ensures their 20-year-old VBA-laden Excel workbooks continue to work on new versions of Excel.
Any change Microsoft makes to their UI, has to require at-most-trivial changes to these enterprise workflows. And so Microsoft can only really make at-most-trivial changes. They can't cut any Gordian knots by e.g. merging two features into one that solves both problems, because then the workflows couldn't work in terms of the original two features any more.
I feel like the only way Microsoft could really get out of this hole, is by just creating an entirely-new suite of products, that "replace" their existing products for new users, but aren't meant to replace their existing products for existing users, and so where the existing products wouldn't get deprecated/put on life support, until they're something only stodgy old dinosaur companies are using any more.
If they're willing to do it (a dozen times so far) for their collaboration/groupware suite; then why not do it for Office?
It's similar to Linux window managers - things that try to copy Windows exactly inevitably cause frustration when certain behaviors (hovering over taskbar icons, dragging to edges) or keyboard shortcuts don't work like how you expect, while something significantly different like Gnome or i3 makes it obvious that you have to learn something differnet.
I would have said that windows is window centric and macOS is application-centric.
On windows you alt-tab between windows and on MacOS you alt-tab between applications and alt-~ between windows inside the currently selected application.
This was followed shortly by installing MacOS on our PC.
I wish HN would have a limited amount of articles, news paper have that already and if the internet is 'out' and i would need to be forced to do something else for the day.
Its probably nice to think and discuss something that specific in desktop/computer historian fansub or so but that should be searched and discovered.
I got so fed up with all the nvidia 30x0 rumors. It was a great launch but every peace of rumor was not adding anything to it.
If HN users upvote something enough, it's on the front page: HS shows you your HN-reading peers apparently like to talk about. Nothing more.
