Not long ago, Microsoft used to make the bulk of its money from its Windows operating system (OS), which was the gateway to the magical world of the personal computer for the majority of people around the world. In 2013, mirroring the shift away from desktops, revenues from its popular Office suite overtook those from the venerable OS. So perhaps it isn’t so surprising that Microsoft has announced it will give away the latest iteration of Windows for free, at least for the first year of its release. It is a move aimed at encouraging adoption and constitutes a central plank of CEO Satya Nadella’s “one Windows” strategy, which envisions a streamlined OS that can run on every desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone. At the same time, it marks an implicit acknowledgement that the once-mighty Microsoft failed to anticipate the many ways in which personal computing would change.
Microsoft — and Windows — still dominate desktop computing. The problem, for Redmond, is that that market is either shrinking or stagnant, depending on the year. Putting together PCs, tablets and smartphones, Microsoft’s market share of all devices is about 15 per cent. That’s because, in mobile computing, Microsoft is well behind Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS; it was a laggard in giving due importance to the development of its mobile OS.
As portable devices such as smartphones and tablets get more powerful and people conduct more tasks on them, the need for a PC, especially for the regular user, is obviated. Word processing, basic image editing, even scanning and printing — there’s an app for all that. This approach to software has spilled over into more traditional computers, too — see the popularity of Google’s Chromebooks, which have done away with an OS and run solely on Web-based applications. Microsoft has finally embraced a similar device-agnostic approach, but it is probably too late to dislodge Google and Apple as leaders of the mobile world.
