Is this the End of Windows?
Great article by Benedict Evans who shares a lot of good information on why Microsoft is going to die.
The apps that people want on smartphones are not being written for desktop Windows anyway. Uber doesn’t have a desktop Windows app, and neither does Instacart, Pinterest or Instagram. The apps and services that consumers care about are either smartphone-only or address the desktop using the web, with only partial exceptions for the enterprise. You can’t tempt developers to support Windows Phone by saying ‘it’s easy to deploy your desktop app to mobile’ if there is no desktop app. So Windows is not a point of leverage for Microsoft in mobile. Neither was Office. Few people really want to edit an Office document on a phone – a viewer is normally enough. And as Blackberry also discovered, enterprise support is not enough if the broader phone experience is sub-par. As Apple has added enterprise features, the appeal of Windows Phone has fallen away there too.
This is an unfortunate result of “Legacy Thinking”. After being entrenched with their Windows platform for the longest time, it is time that Microsoft slaughters their last “sacred cow” if they really want to reinvent their business in the age of the Smartphone.
A soon to be fantastic case study on how large organisations should (or should not) innovate.
Via: Microsoft, Capitulation and The End of Windows Everywhere
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