Yes, Windows and Office are Microsoft's cash cow. M$ loses money on most of their other endevours, and their overhead for support, advertising, and R&D is massive. They might not disappear but they could become irrelevant to the mainstream as IBM and Oracle. Those are still billion-$$$ companies, but they have no influence over the market.

 

and they ruined Skype when they bought that too..... ugh

a long aggravating history of half baked products... that work.. just enough

be glad if you don't remember the roll out of IE4.... what an abortion

 

Internet explorer is the shittiest thing on this Planet! I'm using it only to download firefox/chrome.
I don't like MS - they doing money from nothing. I prefer Linux.
They also bought havok - and I guess it would be shit as always.
DX12 is the stupid attempt to donimate gaming industry. Vulkan will screw DX12 very soon

 

@thantrax
I am trying but i cannot follow your train of thought man. So Surface being a premium tablet is "my opinion" and not everyone's except you, and Ballmer is a failure because he stopped WinFS development. Like it was his decision alone and Bill Gates or the rest of 'em who worked on the project for 7 consecutive years had nothing to do with it lol.
@OBKenobi
Please describe how "they could become irrelevant to the mainstream". Because in my sense, MS will buy out or kill any promising newcomer in the consumer Os biz before you can say "Apple" lol. The only serious desktop contender atm is MacOSX and with 3.8% market share is trying to stay above free Linux which is at 3% and is actually lower than WinXP which has 5.7%.

There will be no end until creativity and innovation gives way to consumerism completely. What you should be asking for, is better music making soft. Personally, i always take it as standard that all OS's suck. Having said that, both Windows and MacOSX are relative to most modern technologies and can be considered good enough commercial platforms. I can't say the same about DAWs though, they still appear too slow to me and not managing system resources correctly in both OS's. Linux may be a solution but it is still far from a user friendly experience.

 

microsoft vive

 

Take Microsoft add one of the many versions of Windows add a DIY PC add soundcard add graphics card add monitor add drivers for everything from just as many different companies, switch on power, hope spontaneous combustion doesn't occur, then ask for help on forums like this asking for help while lambasting stupid Mac owners.

 

In the late 90's I left IE for Opera.
Now is FF+Chrome(only to translate).
IE was/is a gateway to hell...

 

Yeah just passed the corner... the End

 

On the contrary.. ie is one of the most useful sw for me. Seriously! I always take a null device (a program that does nothing, sort of..), put it into the ie directory and rename it iexplore.exe. Then I make ie my default browser and BAM, all dlls and stuff that bypasses the (firewalled) daw and wants to (for example) open a page ..well try to open a webpage or phone home with a brick. (Of course, you just let the "real" ie laying around with some *.xxx extension.)


Edit: could do with other browsers ..but some are really useful, lol.

 

You mean a lin lin, don't you? (I know, worst joke ever lol)

Spot on. From a consumer POV.

Literally MS has bought many small rival companies just to kill them.

And about IExplorer... I'm a veteran web developer and I could tell so many crazy stories specially about v5 and v6. Long story short, I've seen two web designers lose it. No jokes. Screams and all.

How do you know what I did last week?
And while we are at it, how do I fix my PC?
As a side note, Mac is for bitches.

 

Ooh, how long did it take you to come up with that one "Stupito."lol
It sounds like the Democratic bitches in my country.

 

Support for XP stopped ~April 2014. Still has a bigger desktop install base than all the flavors of *nix combined. And bigger than *nix's bastard daughter, that other irrelevant hipster OS :|

"Art is the elimination of the unnecessary."--BrainyQuote
That's how we roll.

 

Who cares ?
I don't know, what about everybody else ?

MS Office all versions is still around 90% Market Share in productivity tools (local market, not talking about cloud).
MS Windows all versions is still around 90% Market Share in OS.

But you know, who cares about facts these days ?

 

Bro there is nothing worse than having to develop web apps / back ends / and working server side than Windows OS. Might not be so bad when the promised but as yet undelivered native Bash and SSH shells become part of PowerShell. Unless you only work in VS and stick to MS Tech like VB and WSOS things start getting very clicky and slow rather fast.

IDK I still like ViM and eMacs. Don't get me wrong, I can work on a PC and I do sometimes but for a code monkey to say MacOS is for bitches makes it seem like you haven't been playing the game very long.

W/E to each his own.....

now back on topic.
##########################
As previously states why are you destroying brain cells thinking about what MS or any other tech company is going to do next. If you are looking to buy stock, and want a deep market analysis and a prospectus this isn't the place for that.

 

We end users care deeply about t̶h̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶l̶p̶ ̶ coders. That's why we enjoy paying more for software, as long as it makes coding easier for you. Especially if this software runs only on overpriced, single-sourced hardware

 

I got a Windows phone by mistake a while back. It was just terrible. The layout and design was stupid. They clearly learned nothing of what made other systems good to use.
Amazes me how such a big and wealthy company can be so shit

 

I really would be worse than stupid, but I was just joking with tooloud own joke