Why Microsoft Keeps Beating Apple And Google With Windows

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Microsoft Windows debuted in 1985 and for the past two decades it has been the dominant PC operating system worldwide. In 2020, Windows had almost 83% market share by unit shipments, while Google Chrome OS had 10% and Apple’s Mac OS had 7%, according to Gartner.

From solitaire to its iconic start button and start up sounds, productivity apps, gaming and corporate computing, Windows changed the way we use computers. The legendary Windows 95 helped propel the company to dominate the market in personal computing. Microsoft has introduced many versions of Windows since its inception with some more memorable than others.

It’s competed with IBM, Apple, and Google for market space. According to Microsoft, there are more than 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10 worldwide on a monthly basis.

Today, Windows only makes up 14% of Microsoft’s business but remains a critical part of it. The company just announced the latest version Windows 11.

CNBC spoke with former Microsoft employees including Terry Myerson, Michael Cherry, Brad Silverberg and Tandy Trower to get a look back at over three decades of Windows.

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Why Microsoft keeps beating Apple and Google with Windows

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42 COMMENTS

  1. Funny how hey claim windows keeps beating all others. Back in the day when they had the MS Dos operating system they would mock and joke about Apple’s superior OS and of course later they had to copy and mimic Apple with the various Windows OS systems. You can keep your windows I’ll just stick with Mac OS thank you.

  2. There are just too much apps written for Windows. They dominated the market at the right time, the same way Apple later did with the iPhone. It's never about UI design and stuff, just app compatibility.

  3. Hope more and more people adopt Linux desktop. The biggest problem has been the lack of Wayland support from developers, but it has been almost solved, and it will be virtually completely solved in a few years if only Java and VLC/Krita support it. Shame on VLC developers being so slow to update their app.

  4. Microsoft and Bill Gates are done, but so is Apple, and Goggle, as they all three have reached their market caps, and enter political ideology into their portfolios, insulting and belittling half the consumers of their products, and another third of consumers that agrees with their ideology, but still see them as greedy corporate profiteers, who promote Global Warming for profit, but at the same time turn lakes into toxic slug, and pollutes the environment more and have a larger footprint than all the coal mines in the world. They are done for the simple fact, that most your consumers despise you.

  5. apple will never win, because in order to use MacOS you need to buy an apple tablet/laptop. which is expensive.
    obviously is not everyone is financially-stupid to have extra bucks to spend on it just because you can . if there are cheaper doable option

  6. Windows is accessible on price point thanks to the licensing model. It's not as high-quality of product, objectively it's OS kernel which is outdated, using monolithic approach to OS kernel design that enables device drivers to impact stability in a way we don't see on OS products built on Linux/Unix foundations, which includes almost everything except Windows, even devices like your Roku and VR headsets. Because it must support so many vendors hardware products, it's impossible to properly QA and while 20 years ago, having the ability to mod a PC with different parts was a huge advantage, in 2024 this is really an advantage only to the PC vendors have a large list of suppliers to pick from. Only a very niche group still build their own systems from parts. Because Apple owns the end-to-end product, from the OS to the processor running on it and uses a very small number of vendors, they have incredible leverage to build a more performant, stable product. Those are objective metrics, not opinion… That doesn't mean Mac OS is right for ever user, but it does mean Mac OS is by most metrics a superior product. You also get free OS updates with Mac OS. You get Apple's Office suite (Numbers, Pages, Keynote) for free. You get iMovie, you get Garage Band, you get Time Machine for backups and a lot of these software products have no good counterparts on Windows.

  7. Simple answer: Every "affordable" PC (desktop / laptop / NON-Cloud laptop) comes with Windows pre-installed. If Mac's were more affordable and they had an equal number of products out there, then maybe they might get a better market share. People know Windows and when they see a computer pre-installed with Windows, they buy it based on that familiarity.
    I personally dumped Windows years ago and opted for Linux (Linux is a whole other story in itself).

  8. I doubt this has been mentioned at all in the comments but the is actually a free open source alternative to windows, it’s called Lineux and is made by some clever chap Debian from Portugal. It’s much better and easier to use than Windows, and if you want a copy Debian will post you a CD with it on if you give him you address.
    I use it all the time, it’s great, except it doesn’t work with my printer, graphics card or software library.

  9. When i switched to macOS recently, i sat and cried asking myself "why i was tormenting myself using windows?" at that time when macOS existed. And i never come near to windows again.

  10. 0:00:20 ' We've struck a chord with Windows where people feel like it's their product. It's their operating system. ' What a bunch of nonsense. Please, Mr. Mehdi. You need to stop lyin' to folk. You know doggone well that Windows belongs to Microsoft. Thus the machine and by extension the user are the product. The only way people can be free is if they switch to Linux as I did four years ago. The only way people get to feel like an OS is 'theirs' is if they are using Linux. Now my laptop truly is my machine. I've never looked back and I have no desire to go back

  11. 1. Doesn't actually answer the title
    2. Real answer: incumbency power and monopoly tactics. Windows is complete dogshit, but we're stuck with it because decades of Microsoft monopoly has created a reliance on it.

  12. It boggles my mind. MS windows is the worst piece of software ever written. It was so bad that ms is Still trying to fix it. THe open registry is a playground for hackers and ms claims it must remain open for software updates. If you want a broke computer go with ms windows.

  13. That comment at the end is incredibly out of touch. I’m a gen z that works in tech. Stability these days is the prerequisite. People expect things to just work. On top of that, people’s attention spans are getting so short that it’s frequently the gadgets and gizmos, the blings and buttons that attract sales these days, particularly in the gen z and millennial generations.

Comments are closed.