Since 1994 every PC company has said that the PC will be dead soon.

PC aint going nowhere. Microsoft still holds desktop dominance.

This doesn't bode well for the new Xbox.

MS is quickly becoming (just) a server/software vendor and moving patent/licensing acquisitions and sales. Their windows server  and exchange server support is pretty steep, but the engineers I'll been assigned to work with on major issues are pretty sharp.

That said their "innovations" on the desktop stopped some time ago.

This is pretty much a repeat of IBM's sunset from market dominance in its day, and this is a pretty much and expected tech cycle.

corq: That said their "innovations" on the desktop stopped some time ago.

That's pretty much because the vast majority of corporate users are quite satisfied with Windows 7. it does what they want, it's reliable and fairly secure. Their employees are used to it, and most importantly, their corporate software runs fine on it.

How can they be obsolete, there are still sprints left in the project.

In case any of you technoweenies hasn't noticed, IBM is still a global org with billions of revenue decades after some of you thought they'd be gone.

If nothing else, Microsoft's sitting on a trove of internal tools that get daily use on campus, but are deemed not worth of shipping due to it not making a threshold of market sales. Any number of these could be turned into products. Thats how Sharepoint came into being. Seriously, the campus inside Redmond and elsewhere has more internally developed Windows tools. Its Windows Admin nirvana out there.

anfrind: Generation_D: How can they be obsolete, there are still sprints left in the project.

In case any of you technoweenies hasn't noticed, IBM is still a global org with billions of revenue decades after some of you thought they'd be gone.

True, but given some of IBM's latest moves (i.e. outsource ALL the engineering!), I think it's fair to expect a slow decline from them.  Companies that large rarely collapse quickly.

If nothing else, Microsoft's sitting on a trove of internal tools that get daily use on campus, but are deemed not worth of shipping due to it not making a threshold of market sales. Any number of these could be turned into products. Thats how Sharepoint came into being. Seriously, the campus inside Redmond and elsewhere has more internally developed Windows tools. Its Windows Admin nirvana out there.

Microsoft does have some amazing engineering talent, but a lot of what they do seems to be adversely impacted by the company's internal politics.  Consider the Courier tablet: by all accounts Microsoft could have used it to beat Apple to the tablet market, but senior management killed it because the first version wouldn't be able to run Office.

Affirmative on the internal politics. All big companies have that, though.

And if you think "hive mind" is endemic to Microsoft, you haven't meet anyone at Google or Amazon or Facebook yet. Holy crap. Microsofties are grounded, well adjusted individuals compared to the internal derp that can happen at GOOG.

Bloody Templar: Oh noes!!!  I need to go update my resume!!!

/No, I don't...
//Visual Studio and the rest of our development technologies ain't goin' anywhere...

Visual Studio was better before Microsoft went full .NET

They should have never gone full .NET

Win 8 is great to see on phones. Want. Might get. Though its funny seeing them come out at concerts or games because you always know its a MS employee that can't ignore email for 2 minutes even at 9 pm at a show someplace.

On PC? I think they messed up removing the possibility of a start menu or a configurable interface that people that just do normal work at a normal job want.

Generation_D: Win 8 is great to see on phones. Want. Might get. Though its funny seeing them come out at concerts or games because you always know its a MS employee that can't ignore email for 2 minutes even at 9 pm at a show someplace.

On PC? I think they messed up removing the possibility of a start menu or a configurable interface that people that just do normal work at a normal job want.

*in before the "You can still do that on Windows 8, you luddite peon!" crowd*

I've got a laptop with Windows 8 and the system is... meh. It's more of a minor inconvenience than an annoyance, not having the normal start menu, and nothing else on it has so far made up for that minor annoyance.

There are times where I do get annoyed, though, when I try to search for "Games" and get sucked into a stupid X-Box Live shiatty App Store which I can't quite figure out yet how to have on the screen with other windows. (right now I'm fairly convinced that this is the first PC I've bought with my own money that DOESN'T have Solitaire, Minesweeper and Hearts installed on it. Which unreasonably annoyed me the first time I went to play those games and couldn't find them.)

Re: Microsoft going Obsolete

It might happen, but if it does it's going to go obsolete because they're going to seriously misread the market, to a degree well above how they've misread the market for Windows 8. The market doesn't need a Windows 8, doesn't particularly want a Windows 8, and so the market isn't reacting very well to Windows 8. A bunch of us who have Windows 8 don't like it, but we don't hate it enough to demand it be taken off of any computer we buy or else we just won't buy the computer.

You take the misreading of the market with Windows 8 (sure, it's nice for Tablets, but for desktops and laptops it's not necessary at all.), then you toss in the errors you got with Windows ME and Vista, and you have Microsoft put serious amounts of capital into it, and then you'll find Microsoft going obsolete.

Microsoft is going to be as obsolete as IBM, in the sense that in a decade, people under 20 will think it's a small company.

sure haven't: Usually I'd say this is not gonna happen, but then usually, they still had normal Word and a normal PC OS.

This Windows 8 will be their undoing, and they deserve every single second of it.

/Windows 8 is a f*cking retarded mess
//my PC is not a "dude, tabletz!!"

This. I love W8 and have installed it on three PCs, but the very first thing I did was to then install Classic Shell to put back  proper start menu and functions. Touchscreen is not and never will be suited for desktop PCs. Unless you are working the till at McDonalds and need to press the picture of a Big Mac on the screen.

Techhell: There are times where I do get annoyed, though, when I try to search for "Games" and get sucked into a stupid X-Box Live shiatty App Store which I can't quite figure out yet how to have on the screen with other windows. (right now I'm fairly convinced that this is the first PC I've bought with my own money that DOESN'T have Solitaire, Minesweeper and Hearts installed on it. Which unreasonably annoyed me the first time I went to play those games and couldn't find them.)

You can download the MS Games Collection from the Store, but they're not as good as the old XP/7 versions. They run full screen only, so you can't play games on a small screen while doing something else on another part of the screen. Fortunately I have dual monitors so I can run other things on the other screen.
Secondly they are just not as smooth or responsive as the old versions. Like when playing Spider Solitaire if you complete a run and they feed off the screen you have to wait for that to finish before you can move the next card. On XP you could move the next card straight away.
So it's the "new and improved App" that is significantly inferior to the old program.

Flint Ironstag: Techhell: There are times where I do get annoyed, though, when I try to search for "Games" and get sucked into a stupid X-Box Live shiatty App Store which I can't quite figure out yet how to have on the screen with other windows. (right now I'm fairly convinced that this is the first PC I've bought with my own money that DOESN'T have Solitaire, Minesweeper and Hearts installed on it. Which unreasonably annoyed me the first time I went to play those games and couldn't find them.)

You can download the MS Games Collection from the Store, but they're not as good as the old XP/7 versions. They run full screen only, so you can't play games on a small screen while doing something else on another part of the screen. Fortunately I have dual monitors so I can run other things on the other screen.
Secondly they are just not as smooth or responsive as the old versions. Like when playing Spider Solitaire if you complete a run and they feed off the screen you have to wait for that to finish before you can move the next card. On XP you could move the next card straight away.
So it's the "new and improved App" that is significantly inferior to the old program.

I'm not entirely sure why, but this is making me giggle uncontrollably. I'm fairly certain that if I had actually found these games, downloaded them and tried them, I would have had an instant unreasonable Rage Attack, followed by spewing copious amounts of overblown bile at the nearest "Windows" thread (which may have caused quite reasonable rage attacks against me for threadshiatting in their "How to Stop Birds Flying Into Windows" thead) about the insanity of Windows farking up such a simple thing.

But to hear about it rather than experiencing it myself? Turns this into a source of amusement at the insanity of Microsoft. Ahh... *Shakes head*

Techhell: Flint Ironstag: Techhell: There are times where I do get annoyed, though, when I try to search for "Games" and get sucked into a stupid X-Box Live shiatty App Store which I can't quite figure out yet how to have on the screen with other windows. (right now I'm fairly convinced that this is the first PC I've bought with my own money that DOESN'T have Solitaire, Minesweeper and Hearts installed on it. Which unreasonably annoyed me the first time I went to play those games and couldn't find them.)

You can download the MS Games Collection from the Store, but they're not as good as the old XP/7 versions. They run full screen only, so you can't play games on a small screen while doing something else on another part of the screen. Fortunately I have dual monitors so I can run other things on the other screen.
Secondly they are just not as smooth or responsive as the old versions. Like when playing Spider Solitaire if you complete a run and they feed off the screen you have to wait for that to finish before you can move the next card. On XP you could move the next card straight away.
So it's the "new and improved App" that is significantly inferior to the old program.

I'm not entirely sure why, but this is making me giggle uncontrollably. I'm fairly certain that if I had actually found these games, downloaded them and tried them, I would have had an instant unreasonable Rage Attack, followed by spewing copious amounts of overblown bile at the nearest "Windows" thread (which may have caused quite reasonable rage attacks against me for threadshiatting in their "How to Stop Birds Flying Into Windows" thead) about the insanity of Windows farking up such a simple thing.

But to hear about it rather than experiencing it myself? Turns this into a source of amusement at the insanity of Microsoft. Ahh... *Shakes head*

If I hadn't had a two monitor setup I'm sure I'd have done what you suggest. At least I can get around one of the huge backward steps. Sort of. But you're right. How can taking away a function Windows has had for two decades, being able to change the size and position of a window and being able to have several windows on screen at the same time, be anything other than a huge step back. Logically it shouldn't be called Windows any more. It should be "Window". Or "No More Multitasking".

/No, Snap isn't the same. Not even close.
//If I want a touchscreen OS I'll buy a touchscreen.

And I still think that had MS shipped W8 as I have it now, with Classic Shell, in other words with Metro as an option rather than being forced to use, W8 would have been a hit. All the benefits of Windows with added touchscreen features for if/when you upgrade! It's win/win!

But no.... They had to screw the pooch and force people to use the touch UI by taking away the Start button and menu and force people to go looking for things hidden in corners, run programmes where you can't change the window size, have those hidden buttons pop up when you accidentally move the mouse anywhere near them and make people with years of Windows experience have to sit there trying to work out "How the hell do I get out of this program?"