Posted on 01/07/2014 7:50:09 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Regardless of how stalled Microsoft Corporation’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) MSFT +0.69% business seems to Wall Street analysts, the fact of the matter is that this company powers 90.73 percent of the Desktops and Notebooks around the world. Its nearest competitor at second place is Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) AAPL +0.14% Mac operating system which has only 7.54 percent market share.
Microsoft released its latest upgrade to the much discussed Windows 8 operating system, Windows 8.1, in October of 2013. Last month, during December, devices running the Windows 8 and 8.1 crossed over 10 percent market share for the first time. A month earlier, in November, it only had a 9.30 percent market share. Effectively, last month Windows 8.x versions gained over 1.49 percent market share, reported The Next Web.
The gain represents a fundamental shift in the Windows userbase, as Windows XP users were forced to abandon the platform as Microsoft is discontinuing support and security updates for XP from April 8, 2014.
As Windows 8.1 was offered as a free upgrade, it will not provide Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) MSFT +0.69% with any revenue gain. However, discontinuing Windows XP will eventually drive the sales of Windows 8.x operating system further up over the course of next few quarters. Back in the first quarter of 2013, Microsoft’s revenues went up 24 percent (in the first three months) compared to the previous year’s first three months; as Windows 8 sales pushed revenues of the Windows division alone to US$ 5.7 billion from US$ 4.633 billion. However, overall as a company, Microsoft’s revenue has been declining since the start of 2013.
In the third quarter of 2013, Microsoft generated only US$ 18.53 billion revenue from its operations, indeed a sharp decline.
However, Microsoft has maintained profitability since the sharp decline it observed during the first two quarters of 2012. As of the third quarter of 2013, its EBITDA has gone down amid declining operating revenue but earnings per share is still at US$ 0.63.
However, sales estimates are looking good for Microsoft this year, the current estimate is set at US$ 25.05 billion by the end of 2014. Microsoft has a lot of new guns to fire this year in order to generate revenue instead of solely relying on its Windows division. The Surface line of products is doing well, as its sales doubled in the third quarter of 2013. Moreover, Microsoft is partnering up with various low cost phone manufacturers in the emerging market segment to sell Windows Phone 8 based cheap phones. Rumors include a deal between Microsoft and Micromax, an Indian phone manufacturer, and even Sony may have joined the bandwagon.
Based on the growth forecast, Zacks just upgraded the company from “underperform” on December 19, 2013. If anyone is looking for investing in an established blue-chip company with growth in mind during 2014, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a good option right now, as the 1 year forward P/E is only at 12.86.
Bullshit! It will be adopted, after they recover from having to deploy Win 7 and can justify the cap/nix to run multi-million dollar projects. That doesn't happen overnight and will not be seen in stats about Win 8 usage for years.
"Windows 8.x has been a significant factor in the plummeting of PC sales since its release,"
Not true, the biggest driver of lack of sales of PCs is tablets, smartphones, cheap price ($39 at rollout) and compatibility of this OS with older hardware (you don't need a new PC like you would for Win 7).
Source: Windows 8.1 is a winner, but PC sales will plummet, says Gartner
[emphasis added]
"Last week, Gartner issued a report titled "Windows 8.1 Could Become What Windows 8 Should Have Been," which concluded that Windows 8.1 will fix many of the problems with the troubled operating system."
... "Most importantly, it recommends that any business that was only considering Windows 8 for touch devices, should also look at Windows 8.1 "for broader deployment," in other words, on traditional PCs as well."
"and traditional computers -- will decline only slightly over that time, because of an uptake in Windows-based smartphones, tablets, and ultraportables."
Yes... it's all about ME now. I don't think you actually have concern over me and my supposed "anger." I think you just want to sell Win 8 and make it look less laughable.
And it is quite clear that the claimed "telemetry" that the "Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program" received showing that people weren't using the start button was horse puckey, based on the bashing they have received from all directions.
I have been installing MS products since before DOS 5, and I don't know of a single person who recommends to clients that they join the Customer Experience Improvement (ahem - spy on you) Program. So if they really did get this telemetry, perhaps it was from a "special" class of users. The kind who didn't know any better than to say no.
I want what I want because it's what I want for my own reasons. They question of "why" should not enter into the minds of the people who want my money. Every Windows 8 computer that is under my control has Classic Shell installed. And over 2000 people per day download it from SourceForge, which isn't even the primary source.
How many people immediately installed CLASSIC SHELL?
If it wasn’t for that, I would go insane at work. Don’t ever leave me alone in a room with a MS UI designer, because only one of us will leave upright.
When your only arguments for something are “It’s the newest thing”, “You can’t handle change” or “you just to dumb to understand” you know you have a dud.
See Soccer, Presta Valves, Obama, 2001: A Space Odyssey, for other examples
No choice, if you need a computer, that is what you get.
I have shut down Metro on my computer but the stupid side menu pops up when I move the mouse. Drives me crazy.
Right click on the start button works for me.
I’m still mad they did away with 3.1’s file manager.
I went straight from XP to 8.1 and assumed that I would be using classic shell, but by the time I tried it, I was already seeing the benefits of 8.1, once I had googled the tweaks I wanted. I never used the shell.
I boot straight to desktop, use the start page for all my programs that I used to use as desktop icons, and like it once I customized it.
RE: I’m still mad they did away with 3.1’s file manager.
VIDEO: Get organized with FILE EXPLORER in Windows 8.1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Exn_5un71A
I suppose then my question should have been “Why are you so mad that Microsoft didn’t ask you if you wanted to keep the start button?”
Because it’s symptomatic of their wrongheaded customer service philosophy. You don’t change for the sake of change, even if your telemetry tells you that you can. When you make decisions like that, you are going to have unforeseen consequences, since the telemetry can’t tell you that users still want the Start menu, even if they are not using it as much as they used to. You have to actually go out and get customer input to find that out, but MS doesn’t do much of that. They would rather try to force the users to use a product the way MS wants them to, than design a product around the way users want to use it.
No thanks. I have been using PowerDesk for years. It took file management the direction that Microsoft should have gone IMHO.
I had the same question six months ago and wound up pulling the trigger on Win 8. It has been almost seamless. The only program that wouldn't run was an old time and billing program I should have updated long ago. No regrets. I run five small businesses on my Win 8 box and it works great. The key is to just bypass all the tile stuff, which is really easy to do. My machine boots directly to the desktop like XP did, including a fully functional start button like XP. As I and others have pointed out, though, Win 8 is way more robust than XP. I'm not a MS fanboy by any stretch, but I don't get all the Win 8 bashing.
For many years I had a lecture that I developed for folks that I called "The fully qualified filename". It took about an hour to go through, but at the end, you had a really good understanding of files, paths, and especially the "." and ".." directories.
Works great with SCP too. I love the shorthand that you can use with that.
zeugma@mysystem.foo.com:/home/zeugma/Downloads/file1.txt
That is a fully qualified name down to the system username used to access it.
KDE took this a little bit further, and actually borrowed a bit from ftp URLs using the "fish" protocol.
On a KDE system, an application that understands fish:// can retrieve a file securely by specifying something like this:
fish://zeugma@mysystem.foo.com:/home/zeugma/Downloads/file1.txt
That tells it to use SSH to login to mysystem.foo.com as user zeugma, and get file1.txt from the /home/zeugma/Downloads directory. If you had your keys set up properly, you could do it without a password prompt. Nice.
Give me a break! We have W8 on phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and servers. It’s unbelievably easy to coordinate everything!
This is BS propaganda!
All they had to do was stop supporting XP... the most used OS on the planet, right now.
That is like banning all pre-2000 cars and then calling the increased sales of new cars an economic revival.
Do you have proof that they don't, or is this just your opinion?
Do you even have access to a running copy of Win 8? If you did you would realize you still have a start menu. The Metro GUI is like a big taskbar and the Start Menu is behind it, you just have to move your mouse and click.
Love how you put words in my mouth - an obvious sign of someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. I bet your like the others, you don't even have access to a running copy. You're just here to bash.
The idea that laptops and phones and everything else should use the same OS is weird.
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