Windows Unified – Granite State Users Groups, LLC

Google may have inadvertently worked itself into some awkward dependencies that could be troublesome for it in the next few years.

It’s hard to imagine Web 2.0, now a decade gone by, as the peak of the web, but I think the numbers speak volumes about it. Below, I’ve grabbed some stats from Wikipedia, as of today (4/26/2015) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems ), that puts together some puzzle pieces together in my head, but introduces a few new ones.

Originally, I was thinking about Windows market share this past weekend, and how absurd it is that folks think of Windows 8/8.1 a “failure”… (It came up at the Global Azure Cloud Camp Jim O’Neil hosted at BlueMetal’s office in Watertown this past Saturday.) There’s more Windows 8+ machine (alone) than all versions of Mac OS X combined… Microsoft’s “failure” is only a failure when compared to Windows XP and Windows 7.

Desktop operating system browsing statistics

Windows 7			58.04%
Windows XP			16.94%
Windows 8.1			10.55%
Mac OS X 10.10			3.96%
Windows 8			3.52%
Windows Vista			1.97%
Mac OS X (other)			1.71%
Mac OS X 10.9			1.61%
Linux			1.5%
Windows (other)			0.2%

Windows 8 / 8.1 comes sums at roughly 13%, while OS X (all versions) is (estimating generously) 8%. So 13% may be a failure compared to Windows 7’s 58%…. but no one thinks of OS X’s 8% market share as anything less than a smash hit.

I get that the terms of failure for 8.x come from it’s largest customer, the enterprise market, which has largely ignored it. It’s why Windows 10 is a significant comeuppance for Microsoft.

All told, though, among desktop OS’s, Windows is king. No surprise there, really. That’s only the beginning of the story.

Some of the other stats started to catch my attention with respect to all devices, and what folks are using them for.

From the same Wikipedia page:
“
According to Gartner, the following is the worldwide device shipments (referring to wholesale) by operating system, which includes smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs together.

Worldwide Device Shipments by Operating System
Source	Year	Android	iOS/OS X	Windows	Others
Gartner^[1]	2014	48.61%	11.04%	14.0%	26.34%
Gartner^[2]	2013	38.51%	10.12%	13.98%	37.41%
Gartner^[3]	2012	22.8%	9.6%	15.62%	51.98%

“

The above table establishes that “device” shipments of Windows devices is relatively small compared to Android devices, with Apple devices coming in 3rd overall. If we set form factor aside and look at all consumer “computing devices”, Android is undeniably tops, and has been for a few years already.

Now look at this… (a breakdown of what OS folks are using web browsers on.)

Web clients’ OS family statistics

Windows			55.74%
Linux based			22.02%
iOS, OS X			17.17%
Symbian, S40			2.02%
Other			3.05%

Linux based is actually composed of both desktop and Android based devices… digging a bit, the stat that shows Android usage specifically shows it at less than half of “Linux” based stats. See the rub? The web is unequivocally consumed by desktops, which are owned by Windows. Android… the most popular consumer “device” (by an allegedly monopolistic margin in some markets), represents less than half the web traffic. Either the margin of error is so far off these stats, rendering them all useless, or there’s an interesting story there. This means the good old browser is being left behind by mobile devices. This has been observed before, but it’s interesting to note that Google’s hanging on it. I mean, what’s your home page? If you’re like a lot of folks, it may well be www.google.com. Here’s a question. Is the browser propping up Windows, or is Windows propping up the WWW? Here’s an answer… Microsoft’s go-forward strategy is Mobile First / Cloud First. Windows 10 is a mobile OS that supports desktops, not a desktop OS that supports mobile. Clearly, Microsoft is taking risks, but their goal is to push Windows into the mobile app world, taking only the parts of the world wide web that are important to mobile and cloud. One might argue that Windows 10 includes both IE 12 and the Spartan browser. Further, Microsoft is just releasing a new ASP.NET and MVC web development tools. No matter what, the web app is not going to vanish overnight. Still, Microsoft adding yet another browser and more tools is 1) further fragmenting the already terribly fragmented web app platform, 2) a bone thrown to the many enterprises who have built their infrastructure on web technology and can’t afford to fully shift their enterprise app platform (and developer skill set) to mobile apps in the next few years, and 3) continued support for the still critical http protocol that is a core network transport for everything in the Internet of Things. One might argue Office 365. The backfire there: pretty much everyone who has Office 365 also has desktop and even mobile apps. This leaves Office 365 to be primarily a services back end for those apps, with a web-based UI as a fallback if you for some reason can’t run the native apps. Apple’s iOS success and Google’s Chromebook failure led Google to cannibalize itself into the (unexpectedly?) wildly successful Android. Android’s success, in turn, is eating away at Google’s classic model… Google will likely always be a media platform first, but more and more, that media platform is being confined to (and defined by) Android. (Like a genie enslaved to its bottle… “Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space.) All in all, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Microsoft is about done propping up the consumer web as an application platform. Still, forgetting what Microsoft is doing, Google is SaaS heavy, and has no PaaS or IaaS offering to fall back on. They have no desktop OS to elevate them. All the cards in their foreseeable future appear to rest on Android (and therefore Samsung). With the anti-trust suits already starting against Google because of Android, it’s hard to really see Google’s future over the next decade. Being at the top, it’s pretty easy to say Android is peaking. The question is where does that leave Google. YouTube? Self-driving cars? I find myself thinking it makes a bit more sense that Apple and Yahoo have aligned their search with Bing. What am I missing?

HoloLens took the spotlight when //build/ 2015 announced it had sold out in under an hour, but I can’t help but think at least as big a chunk of the excitement is around Windows 10 (or as we developers like to think of it, Windows Unified). As cool as HoloLens is, Windows 10 will most likely be landing in your lap long before HoloLens has images dancing in your living room.

If you’re not already preparing for Windows 10, your solution delivery stack could be in for a shock from the client up. Microsoft is in the process of launching a re-boot of itself, and Windows 10 is the fulcrum of that effort. As usual, many of its changes are aimed at pulling developers in. If solution development has a place in your organization, this will likely impact you as well.

“Mobile First / Cloud First” is, as always, the key phrase, and for a client OS… if it’s not for cloud devices…. give it a moment… let that sink in… Yes. Windows 10 is an OS for mobile devices. Even if your device is a big heavy block of a workstation sitting near your monitor. It will have the same mobile app store as phones and tablets, and it can be managed by the same Enterprise Mobile Device Manager (MDM).

Windows 8 was an introductory / transitional OS. With Windows 10, the transition matures. Windows 10’s maturity is likely to make it far more palatable than Windows 8 was. (Keep in mind that Windows 8 is only a “failure” in terms of Microsoft’s other OS releases… Windows 8/8.1 has a bigger install base than some of the most “successful” of its non-Microsoft competitors. If Windows 10 becomes the hit many foresee it to be, it has potential to become the de facto standard platform to truly de-throne XP and even Windows 7.)

Windows 10 also adds a bit of a surprise, especially around browser technology. Microsoft is tossing in to Windows 10 a whole new web browser (in addition to Internet Explorer) currently code-named Spartan. This new browser is intended to go after the consumer browser market, which IE has lost considerable ground in. I speculate that Spartan will be a breath of fresh air for consumers who feel IE’s bloat-related flaws collectively compels them to download Chrome or Firefox.

If you’re a web application developer who does more than a little HTML, on the other hand, you’re probably already groaning. You know what a pain browser compatibility is. (The browser was never intended to be a homogenous cross-everything platform, but that’s how a lot of web designers treat it, and they’ve shaped culture to expect it. Despite the best efforts of tools like jQuery and others to try homogenize, and trends like responsive to try to change the culture of presentation homogeny, web application developers get severely burned in the crossfire. I’ve got more than a few scars to prove this, but you don’t have to look further than jQuery’s failed mechanisms for helping developers with these issues. (First there was $.browser and $.browser.version, then $.support… then, “awe… heck… we give up, use Modernizr“.) /rant )

Spartan is a move that makes total sense, but it can’t help but add complexity to web application developers’ lives.

In fact, in my mind, the long term net message is… there’s only one way to end browser pain… by getting out of web as a client platform. (Web services are the only part of the web worth salvaging.)

Microsoft has seen what platform diversification has done to its core OS business, and it’s not good. Developers need a consistent platform to deliver consistent solutions on, and that’s been a bigger part of Microsoft’s success over the years than even they seem to have realize.

So if web application development is becoming ever more complex in an already over complicated domain, how should one produce and deploy apps?

In a word: native (aka mobile).

Windows 10 is a unifying platform, a “pentecostal” event to counter the “tower of babel” event of Windows platforms that have fractured into existence since the end of the .NET Compact Framework era. Where before development was requiring more and more effort to support PC, tablet, smartphone, wearable and even Xbox, Windows 10 has a unified SDK across all those platforms. For the first time ever, a .NET developer can build a single solution that runs in all those devices. There may be runtime differences between platforms that have to be ironed out, still, but not compile-time (if(system.capability.phone) {} rather than #ifdef WINDOWS_PHONE_APP)

And think about it… what are the big reasons for web deployment? Centralized management and centralized deployment. Think back to MDMs and mobile app stores.

(Xamarin plays a roll in all this as well. Between Windows 10 and Xamarin, developers will be able to leverage a good chunk of their code base across all hardware, even non Microsoft platforms such as IOS and Android. This, too, is a breath of fresh air, because the cost of maintaining multiple code bases (and talent pools) is ever climbing. Xamarin will likely never be the 110% development experience that the latest .NET framework is, but neither was Silverlight for Windows Phone 7, yet one could do some fairly heavy lifting with it.)

Because Windows 10 is one platform that runs across form factors, it essentially means that any app written for Windows 10 is a mobile app. In that light, it means that Windows 10 is most likely to vault Windows into the top spot for mobile platforms by its projected install base.

This on top of Microsoft’s recent “trickle up” theory of mobile market share growth, where Microsoft has been grabbing market share by targeting the feature phone market. (This tactic has little effect in the US, where carrier subsidies nullify the low end to “$0”) At some point Windows Phone will hit critical mass outside the US. Once that happens, even US developers will no longer be able to afford to ignore it.

Even if Microsoft is not contributing directly to your solution stack, Windows 10 and its biases have potential to culturally influence your solutions and solution delivery over the next decade.

Tag: Windows Unified

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