Will you pardon my boldness but your messages do not sound to me as if you ever were a Windows fan or advocate, neither here nor elsewhere. I don't intend to be impolite or sound as if I were one - it might simply be a slip caused by my not being a native English speaker - but I'm a little taken aback by reading such messages on a forum dedicated to a language that's being developed under Windows, for Windows (at least for now), and with Windows instruments.
So a Windows fan/user is only somebody who shares your exact same beliefs?
MS Windows needs not reimplement somebody else's API's to stay alive and kicking - it already is what it is and will hopefully continue to be.
Given Microsoft's history there is no need to, they just outright buy it or steal it. When caught stealing it, they either pay off who they stole it from, or in rare instances like the fiasco with Stacker, MS removes the stolen technology and has to issue a new version of their OS. Microsoft can claim the original MS BASIC as their own, but that is it. They have never been about innovation, they have always been about rushing a product to market any way they can. MS DOS was pre-existing and outright bought. The non-NT versions of Windows were based on DOS. The NT kernel was developed by IBM, Microsoft and DEC. DirectX was an existing technology that was outright bought. You can literally keep going down the list, even to minuscule parts of Windows like the CD/DVD burning.
Do you really think the stupidity of just one CEO in such a colossal corporate entity as MS might affect its financial state or perspectives too seriously?
Given that under Ballmer, Microsoft lost $34 billion dollars in a single day, I would have to say a definitive yes. Under Ballmer, Microsoft also lost the spot as the #1 tech company (in revenue) to Apple.
There's nothing worse in this life than to be waiting and to be trying to catch up.
Unfortunately because Microsoft keeps trying to play catch up and uses a "me too" development philosophy to do so, this is why MS is in the current state it is in. MS has not learned from their mistakes, but they have been playing "me too" almost since their inception.
There may be millions of Linux fans but do not forget there already are over one and a half billion (!) PC's installed all over the world.
And the vast majority of those PCs are installed and used in a corporate environment. Since most development for corporate is done "in-house", that is really of no benefit to indie developers. You also need to remember that PC has no real definition and certainly not a marketable definition. In 2008, Microsoft was still selling licenses of Windows 3.11 because it was still in wide use on commercial aircraft. Although the computers on these commercial aircraft were PCs, there is not much of a market for indie developers and 16-bit software. So even the definition of PC has no usable standardization. Heck, you still have many manufacturing companies plugging along with PCs running DOS.
The statistics you really want are how many XP and above systems exist in the consumer market, those would be legitimate statistics for indie developers. However, you can't even get accurate numbers of how many copies of an OS has been sold as MS reports the number of copies sold to stores and OEMs, not how many copies actually get bought by a consumer and actually used by a consumer.
Most of us seem to have their own pet project and we'd rather concentrate on that one.
Some of us are here because we believe in Charles' vision for O2 and want to explore it further and support it if we can. Supporting indie BASICs is a good thing. There are not many usable BASICs left.
I think Microsoft is too big to fail anytime soon. But it may go the way of IBM, and merge into the background of our hi-tech infrastructure.
Microsoft will be around in the corporate sector for decades. And Microsoft will never fail as long as Linux is around, especially when it comes to the mobile market. As the Android market continues to grow, Microsoft will continue to make money off of the sale of each Android device due to patent licensing. Last year, Microsoft brought in almost 4 billion dollars just from Android device sales.
I would like to say Microsoft will always be around in the consumer market, but Microsoft is struggling to overcome the changes in the consumer market from desktops to laptops and tablets and other mobile devices. Moves like buying Nokia is not helping. It is insane to buy a company that lost 40% of its revenue in a three month period. Of course then you look at why Nokia collapsed it was because they replaced their Symbian OS with the Windows Phone OS. Nokia signed that deal in 2011 and was the #1 mobile phone provider. Thanks to Windows Phone OS, Nokia had fallen to #10 by the time Microsoft bought them. It was an engineered collapse and now MS has the technology to once again "me too" after Apple and bring their own phone hardware to the market, even though the market has shown they have no interest in Windows Phone OS and will avoid it like the plague. With moves like this, it is hard to have faith in the future of Microsoft in the consumer market.
