Windows is not over? I see Microsoft as similar to IBM now. They will make a lot of money from their Rolodex, possibly more than they ever made before, but they no longer own a relevant platform someone would write new software for.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, when a platform is dying its owner:
1. Tries to capture all profit from the edges.
2. Extracts value "unreasonably" both to grab what they still can and to create an explanation for the death. This could be high fees, ads, or extraction of market intelligence.
3. Begins embracing the new platform with compatibility layers.
4. Starts making 2 offers on everything. One with their legacy and one with the rising platforms.
5. Treats their nonfounding CEO as significant and someone to listen to.
Plenty of companies make this transition successfully (I chose IBM as the example) and make huge profits from not having to charge uniform prices across the entire market. But the discussion was the windows platform being replaced by Linux, not Microsoft profits.
Are you aware of IBM in the enterprise software industry? They manage to do almost all of that with their own software and open source rebundled.. No OS/2, almost no 3rd party programmers who are interested in their platform.
That is the future of Microsoft and the non-future of Windows.
