If you open up the average $700 corporate user PC’s case, you’ll find that it’s basically an empty sheet metal shell. You’ll find some whack-spec ATX-like motherboard the size of a steno pad with masked off PCIe headers, no expansion cards installed, empty drive bays aside from some cheap 250gb HDD, a single stick of 4GB or 8gb RAM, and maybe a thin laptop-type DVD-ROM that nobody will ever use. Most places are getting by with no network hardware outside of a WiFi Router so the only thing hooked up to a corporate PC is a video monitor, mouse/keyboard, and AC power cable. Possibly a Lightning/USB cable connected to a USB port that’s recharging the user’s personal smartphone. You couldn’t expand it even if you needed to.
People are instead using their own BYOD non-MSFT tablets and phones to Skype & IM with their coworkers. Email is quickly becoming the lamest way to communicate thanks to social media making its way into corporate web-based groupware. The laser printers in the office have all basically been dimmed out in power saving mode for the last five years. Nobody can remember printing jack squat much less remember the last time they heard the HP LaserJet come out of sleep mode.
Most users still using a Windows PC are issued the bare minimum life support system for Win7 or freebie Win10 upgrade, and there’s really no compelling reason to run Windows at all as a desktop client in an emergent age of web based apps. The workplace is the only place a great many PC users even touch a PC anymore. MSFT’s Windows OS sales prove it. That’s why they’re giving it away free to the planet because gee, what corporate slug PC didn’t come with Win7 installed anyway?
I think an honest appraisal here is that the concept of the PC is croaking and it’s even starting to drag down Microsoft’s office suite along with it. Their back office server suites will be all that’s left and even more vulnerable to RedHat. By then, they’ll have lost mainstream visibility and will be heading the same direction where Novell Netware ended up. Microsoft can’t be liking this which is why they’re making comical gestures like copy-catting Apple Stores and making their own laptops and tablets — which, if you haven’t been keeping up, are a pretty dubious competitor to Apple iPads, iMacs, and MacBooks just like Microsoft’s miserable-assed Windows phones and Zunes were to iPhone and iPod. They just don’t have it in them.
My prophecy is that the last things Microsoft will have is Xbox, MS Excel, Visio, and MS SQL Server ... and the server versions needed to host it. So many workplaces are still getting by fine with Office 2003 and SQL 2008. That’s why Microsoft is hawking MS Office 365 for basically as much as it costs to buy a single lunch for team members on a group ‘team building’ outing.
The PC is the final piece of IT crap that needs to be replaced by something else. Its not quite there yet with any other solution, but the writing is on the wall that the workspace of the 1990s is being made obsolete by the people who work there choosing something different and doing it with their own wallets.
I’m by no means calling Microsoft dead — they have lots of capital and time to think up a good plan if they get some crackerjack visionaries in there — but right now we’re at the point where there’s not as many people who care if MSFT lives or dies as there were ten years ago when their bleeding began.
If you have any brilliant ideas on how to reverse Microsoft’s perilous position, you really ought to apply there. They’ll listen to anything at this point. Apple, however... Dang, son: Try to get a parking space within 100 yards of an Apple store this time of year. That’ll tell you something right there.
Wow, what an insulting post
I guess Fanboys still find the need to defend all mighty Apple....
Just like the liberals have to defend Obama to the death
In the corporate environment, the end point doesn’t matter, whether it is a Mac, Dell Desktop, HP Workstation, iPad, Android Smartphone, it has no value. It is just a tool, like a drill or wrench, it does what it needs to do. If it breaks, you fix or replace it.
In the corporate datacenter, you have rows of racks of Dell or HP servers, running Linux or Windows server or VM ware or whatever.
I hope you guys don’t think the “cloud” involves a real cloud or something.....
That's the truth. And don't forget the inevitable whining cheap-ass cooling fan that is specd for the these corporate machines. Nothing but the cheapest of everything.