The End Of Microsoft Windows

Yesterday I read a really interesting article about the end of Windows as we know it. I can't say that I disagree with that assessment at all.

As many of you know, Windows Vista was basically my sole reason for moving to a Mac last year. I had installed it on my Toshiba notebook computer and it was the slowest piece of a garbage I had ever used -- none of the drivers worked properly, and it crashed for no reason. The worse part was their "upgrade wizard" said my machine would be fine. Here's a little video I took while installing it (looks like it's up to 50,000 views on YouTube):

The thing about Mac, at least in terms of an OS, is that's basically the BSD kernel with a nice UI on top of it. And I say that in a good way. What it means is that Mac OS kernel is essentially tried and true, and Mac engineers can put their time into making the user experience great, which is what Macs have typically been known for.

Contrast that with Microsoft, who at each step see to try to reinvent the wheel again. One of the main selling points about Vista was a new database-like file system called WinFS. Of course, Microsoft pulled it from the product since they couldn't seem to get it working right.

In terms of my website, here's the latest data on operating systems:

As you can see, Mac is slowly growing on my list (they were < 5% typically last year). Granted, my readership is heavily biased towards the geek side of the spectrum, but the point is the same. Microsoft is losing some serious share of the market to Apple. I know a lot of enterprise users were waiting for the release of the new Microsoft Office on the Mac, and now that it's out, are actually switching their desktop computers at work to Macs. Look at me - I'm a windows developer at work, and you know how I develop software? In a Windows XP virtual machine on my 8-core MacPro.

Maybe Windows really is dying.