inbound - 8:49 pm on Mar 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

There are lots of reasons why companies/people do not switch over when replacing hardware; but there's a valid point in that some people will end up switching without caring/noticing.

We just need to look at risk management and the responsibilities of CTO's to see why large companies often choose to stick with what they know (which is often MS). I see MS continuing to have a high penetration in the workplace, and they work really hard to keep that valuable market (as do the companies that support MS systems).

I'm another who could have moved away from MS as I have servers that are Red Hat / Centos - but I choose to stay with Win7 / Office because it's stable enough (although there are issues) and Excel does things with enormous spreadsheets that allow me to manipulate data and test algorithms faster than LAMP (although I do take the results and deploy in LAMP).

For me, Excel is a very flexible front end for a test database (which is flatter than a relational system) which makes my overall development environment easier/faster.

It's killer features that will keep people on board, along with the risk aversion. But, as is rightly pointed out, many people have no need for any special features and are not making risk assessments when buying a home / small office machine.

Browsers, Apps & very mobile devices (lightweight laptops, tablets and phones, more so than traditional laptops) will bring on the change being suggested. These things do what people want, and hardware is such that gaming is really the only area where specifications really need to be extreme on such devices. But the computing device market is changing so who knows how the percentages will interact with each other (more devices overall, so a loss in penetration does not always mean a loss in revenue).