In terms of market capitalisation, the decline in Microsoft's dominance has already been clearly visible

Business Insider recently wrote that Microsoft's Windows monopoly was surprisingly fast broken by the new wave, and that it had only been 15 years since the company's 1990-year lawsuit, and that the future of Windows and the traditional PC industry seemed only to get worse.

The following are the main contents of the article:

At the end of the 1990, one company was at its zenith-and ambitious, not only to dominate its own industry, but also to occupy a large and rapidly growing new industry--so much so that it was eventually dragged into a protracted antitrust lawsuit by the US government.

That company is Microsoft. The case finally settled, and Microsoft agreed to converge on its actions.

But it seems there is nothing to worry about in the industry. As is often the case in the tech industry, the market dominance of the world's personal computing equipment, which has been built up over the past 15 years, is a market shift, not a lawsuit threat.

As Microsoft's vision of PCs as the center of the technology World spawned the world's first trillion-dollar enterprise, the internet came along.

The internet has swept through the PC industry like a wave.

In terms of market capitalisation, the decline in Microsoft's dominance has long been clear. Its share price is still only about half the peak of 13 years ago. The fundamentals of the PC industry have been affected for a long time, but they are now becoming apparent.

Microsoft's "Windows Monopoly" was broken, but not to the point of pushing it to the edge of the industry. Windows, a once-arrogant desktop operating system platform, is now a mere device driver, thanks to exploding cloud computing, smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. As long as your device is networked and running some applications, it doesn't matter which operating system you use.

The following picture shows exactly how Microsoft and other PC giants like Intel, Dell and HP are facing the challenge of adapting to the Internet-driven New world.

The first is global equipment shipments. In the 20 years before 2005, the personal computer was a solo show, with annual sales of about 200 million units. But smartphones and tablet computers, which were born later, have now overshadowed the PC market.

Global Shipments Trend chart for each section of networking equipment

At the same time, the use of personal computing devices has greatly weakened the Windows operating system platform. Just 3 years ago, Microsoft Windows remained dominant, with a market share of 70% per cent of personal computing equipment.

Now, with Google Android and Apple's iOS, Windows ' Global share has been cut by more than half, leaving only about 30%. Obviously, Android has become a much more powerful platform than Windows.

Global market share trend Chart of major computing platforms

Finally, the following chart from Asymco analyst Horace Dediu (Horace Dediu) shows that the PC industry is not only far inferior to smartphones and tablets, but it is also beginning to shrink.

Consumers are using more device options, and a full-featured pc is usually not the most cost-effective, convenient, or easy way to do what they want. In other words, instead of being the center of the personal computing industry, PCs have become dedicated office equipment.

Windows PC Shipments Growth Change chart

Not all bad news for Microsoft. The company has been quite successful in transferring from the unit-driven sales model to the licensing model. In the licensing mode, the new computer partners need to pay Microsoft every year for each user fee, no longer buy a permanent license. Microsoft's Office business remains hugely profitable and dominant in the market, partly because Google, Apple and other Internet companies are not investing much in the sector.

But it is hard to imagine that the "monopoly" of Microsoft, which has incurred antitrust lawsuits for only 15 years, has ceased to exist. In the future, the outlook for Windows and the traditional PC industry seems only to get worse.