"Woe is me" says Bill - the gloomy Microsoft doom thread

I'm sure there will be, however I have my doubts that many developers will care about it. I cannot see any future for a proprietary graphics API in an open source world. Maybe if Microsoft wake up and give away Windows for free? Not much chance of that happening either.

Roy's statement is probably best read as "Microsoft is heading towards irrelevancy".

 

This has been said for more or less 20 years now. Nothing happened so far.

 

You can't say nothing has happened when Microsoft has gone from 90% OS market share to less than 20% in the past 8 years.

http://www.zdnet.com/windows-has-fallen-behind-apple-ios-and-google-android-7000008699/

 

Open source world, ha; we have the most closed platforms ever. Sadly Microsoft used to be one of the least closed ones, but are chasing the wrong direction IMHO. Soon enough consumers will wake up and realize that not being able to bring their apps from one phone to another (or tablet, or PC) - purely because of software to ensure vendor lock-in - is nonsense...

 

You can't really count mobile devices into same category even if they're getting closer to "general computers"

 

Right, introducing a new (often complementary) market is not the same as "losing" market share in the established one.

 

I think you can now count them in the same category. I don't know the figures but I'm quite sure more people play games on phones and tablets than they do on traditional PC's these days. That can only mean that devs are more likely to write more games for Android and less for Windows in future (obviously PC games command much higher prices but also have far higher development costs).

I believe the truth is that AMD wants Windows to go away as it is adding a high entry cost to traditional PC's, and due to AMD being entry-level priced...

 

I'm sure Microsoft is doing it internally.

 

This chart makes no sense to me. What is this other that took went from 0% to a huge chunk of the market in 2005? How did Apple grow from 5% to 21% in 2005, two years before iPhone was released, then not grow one bit once it was (nor for iPod Touch, then iPad)? The only part that looks reasonable at all is Google's growth.

My guess is the testing methodology and sample group changed substantially throughout this survey, although even that doesn't really explain it...

 

Yep some stuff in the chart does look a bit off - it's happened much faster than the past 8-9 years. Symbian was the OS I believe though?

The point does kind of stand however, Microsoft had 90%+ OS share up until recently now it's down near 20%, simply because they are nowhere in phones or tablets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Summary

 

True, but when it comes to games the landscape is a little different.. For starters we should count XBox for DirectX. I wonder if Durango is going to be DX12.

Most of those other platforms are using OpenGL ES 2.0, far below DX11 specs.. OpenGL ES 3.0 support is on the horizon but it'll take quite a while before it's reliably standard on phones. And it's still going to be quite behind DX11, much less whatever DX12 brings. The other problem is that it's pretty much unheard of to sell a game for more than $20 on those platforms (and you get slammed for trying that, plenty of people seem to think charging anything more than $5 is an insult). So while the volume is huge the profit margin is not and it's questionable how well top tier games can do there right now. For most developers whom DX had any relevance in the first it'll continue to be relevant and they'll continue to make a big chunk of their sales on XBox and Windows PCs (and libgcm on PS4). If there are phone ports they'll be stripped down renditions deemed at a substantially later time to be worth spending a porting budget on.

 

Microsoft had 90%+ OS share in PCs, and probably still has at least close to it.
What came in 2005 that suddenly counts as the same category, even remotely?

 

Yes Kaotik but the point is that the PC market is being eaten by tablet and phones.

The enthusiast gaming market is losing traction to the mobile gaming market - how long before devs start taking the less risky option there? I know PC games command much higher prices but like I said they also have much higher development costs, and one flop can cost $millions.

How long before Microsoft need to cut down on costs in order to compete? DirectX12 - if it even exists - must be pretty high up the chopping block order don't you think? How much of a priority is that for them now...I don't know.

The whole thing appears to be in some kind of death spiral and I wouldn't be taking anything for granted. Roy Taylor sure isn't saying DX12 probably won't exist if it already does, that's for sure.

 

Mobile gaming is a fundamentally different market, the games are for the most part a fairly different breed. If you're talking about the top tier console + PC gaming market as it is today going away then you're talking about a huge shift in the type of games that'll be available. Something that goes far, far beyond what API is being used to make them. Or people will have to start allowing for a broader range of sales prices on the app stores instead of treating anything higher as sacrilege. I don't know why people act this way but they do, everywhere you go you can see someone saying a game sounds amazing but there's no way they'll pay $10 for it.

Spending on PC games has grown out of control, I agree with that.. but the reason why it's happened is because everyone is going after these crazy 20M sales targets. Console gaming volumes haven't been going down. This isn't based on a whole lot, but I get the impression that the console buying market is friendlier to lower budget games than the mobile market is to higher cost games. So I don't think that developers really must spend $10m on their console games, and I hope there's more of a trend to relax on that.

Is DirectX12 really tied to increasing costs of gaming development? Is it a huge cost for Microsoft, who makes enough money so long as at least someone is selling games like crazy on their platforms?

 

I'm trying to think of how recently there's been a glut of massive-budget PC games, aside from MMOs, which have always been massive undertakings.

On the other hand, I see AAA budgets and ad campaigns for console or multiplatform games, and those devs are freaking out.
That model is borderline even with console volumes.

 

Again I ask you, what happened in 2005 that suddenly made it count to same shares?
First smarphone came earlier, but smarphones really kicked off in any notable amounts a lot later, same for tablets.

edit:
And Apple jumped from 5 to 21% years before iPhone and even more years before iPad if that's supposed to count phones & tablets too? Suuuure

 

Symbian mostly - 30-40 million Nokia smartphones sold in 2005-2006. Actually a few of them must have been selling a lot more than I realised.

You can argue their usefulness as gaming OS's back then of course but now it's pretty clear that the gap has closed in terms of Android and Windows. DirectX12 isn't going to sell more Windows phones in the future just the same as DirectX11 isn't selling more Windows phones now.



Surprising yes.

 

It looks silly because Symbian sales didn't come from nothing starting in 2005. They just arbitrarily decided it crossed a threshold where it was worthy of consideration. Not like 2005 marked a major release either, S60 wasn't until 2006, although their sales did increase a lot year over year from 2002 to 2006.

 

Smartphone growth was pretty explosive at that point however - it's quite likely that nobody was really counting until 2005.

 

That last chart also highly disagrees with this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Historical_sales_figures :/ I think people are just playing fast and loose with what they do and don't consider a smartphone or even worse, worthy of representing OS distribution overall.