Re: How much influence did Microsoft have in this?
A person I know is going to replace her desktop PC, eventually, after almost ten years. She bought a new, larger monitor a few years ago, but is replacing the PC only now because it started to fault.
She does invoicing and other tasks for her father business.
The truth is more and more people now replace PCs when they break, not because a new model offer needed features or run needed software an old model can't.
Offloading tasks to the cloud also means less need to increase local procesisng power.
On the server side, while cloud companies may be buying a lot of servers, it also means less servers sold to business - and I guess the cloud companies are far better in exploiting each server than the average business - but even the latter will use virtualization to coalesce workloads on fewer ones.
The industry must adapt to much longer replacement cycles. Or increase planned obsolescence <G>.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
