The Windows Era is over...

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/The-Windows-era-is-over/1274899297

by rooshdi • 16 years ago

36 37 16 years ago

barnaby• 16 years ago

In other news, water is wet, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is STILL dead.

TomOfTTB• 16 years ago

Short Version: There's blood in the water. People are realizing Windows could fail and that in itself is leading Windows down the road to failure because other companies are now starting to vie for Microsoft's core business where as they wouldn't have dared before(Example: HP buying WebOS)

watmough• 16 years ago

Windows is going to have to play nice with other technologies.

To an extent, this is already in place, with technologies such as WCF that support web standards.

I'm currently talking with a potential client about splitting out part of a Silverlight thick app to a platform-agnostic RESTful api to allow mobile and webapps.

It's to Microsofts credit that this sort of thing is getting easier, though it's an uphill battle to sell such techniques to Microsoft development shops that still regard running a Citrix viewer to a Terminal Services farm, as a web-app.

c00p3r• 16 years ago

It was over in 2003. It's time to consider the ends of iPhone and Facebook eras. =)

donaq• 16 years ago

In March I declared the end to the Wintel (Windows-Intel) hegemony when asking...

About five years ago, when blogging as an analyst, I asserted that computing and informational relevance had started shifting from the Windows desktop to cloud services delivered anytime, anywhere and on anything...

That's a pretty odious writing style.

Hexstream• 16 years ago

There's a name for that: Unwarranted Self-Importance.

blub• 16 years ago

It seems that 2010 is the year of the cloud on the desktop. With revolutionary products such as Youtube, who can argue?

On a more serious note, I really don't see why everyone is getting so excited about their devices becoming dumb terminals and giving away their power to corporations that own the cloud.

I shudder at the thought of powering on a ChromeOs device and having to log in to Google to be able to do anything.

Not sure about the Windows era being over, but we're certainly entering a Google era and it's getting really difficult to ignore Google. Both of the Opera browsers on my phone are locked into Google search (previous versions had mulltiple providers, Amazon, Wiki, etc). Firefox comes with Google. Chrome comes with Google. Android is tightly integrated with Google. A lot of people use Gmail and Gdocs due to lack of alternatives. A lot of websites use a Google powered search.

I'll never buy an Android device because I'm getting weary of Google: they're becoming too powerful and control too much information.

Furthermore, they are competing unfairly: they use their ads profits to dump products on the market at very low prices or for free, killing the (possible) competition. For now this has been good for the consumer, with two observations: you're not getting something for free, you're paying with your privacy; once google gets big enough it may get to be the only player in some markets and that always ends badly.

loewenskind7• 16 years ago

I wish more people thought about this. Google isn't a charity, and even if their leaders really were benevolent they wont be there forever.

bad_user4• 16 years ago

No, Google is a company subject to the forces of a free market ... competition, choice, advancements in technology, natural selection.

An economy where everybody gets their products / utilities from charities ... is called communism ;)

bad_user4• 16 years ago

> Furthermore, they are competing unfairly: they use their ads profits to dump products on the market at very low prices or for free, killing the (possible) competition

How's that unfair?

I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low and I only stay with them as long as their products kick ass. Not only that, but they do make it easy to import and export your data using standards on all their products that I use ... GMail has POP3 out of the box, Gdocs can export your docs in whatever format (HTML/OO/PDF/Word/Excel), GReader can export your feeds in OPML.

As far as search engines go, replacing them is ~5 clicks away in both Chrome and Firefox. And from a dev POV, I only care about white-hat seo stuff, like having good articles with semantically correct tagging that all other search engines care about.

I care more about the availability of my data and about my privacy. There's no point in fear mongering about what might be as long as they are playing nice ... trust and reputation have been the foundation of any society for thousands of years, I can't see why that wouldn't continue to work.

E.g. both Apple and Microsoft have betrayed my trust, and now I don't use their products or recommend them anymore. And I don't really miss them that much ;)

greyman• 16 years ago

I also think it is somewhat unfair. They have lot of money from their ads, so they can create product in another category (for example GPS), and offer it for free, while other companies who don't have those advertising dollars can't offer their product for free. Basically they can easily kill competition in certain niches, since they can support their product by money gained by another product (Adsense/Adwords). Maybe it is not unlawful, but fair is it not.

loewenskind7• 16 years ago

>I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low

It is today. And it was with MS back in, what, the 80's? How easy is it to switch a big business off of them now?

The point here is that competition is important, and when one party is using an extremely profitable and largely unassailable part of their business to ensure they don't have to compete in others they choose participate in that is dangerous for legitament competition.

viraptor• 16 years ago

> I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low

Right now it is, but they control the platform. One day they can flip the switch for something you don't like and disable pop3 and imap (saying it's not used by enough people to support it, for example).

You can't roll back from that state. It would be crazy amount of work to screen/page-scrape Gmail.

Also, it takes only one problem on their side to remove your whole email address. How much do you think they care about it, if it happened to you only and you weren't using paid apps with support option?

ElbertF• 16 years ago

Jaiku and Buzz didn't exactly kill Twitter. Orkut didn't kill Facebook. Latitude didn't kill Foursquare. Google Code didn't kill GitHub. Knol didn't kill Wikipedia. Smaller companies still manage to get ahead of Google by innovating, it's not just a matter of big money.

loewenskind7• 16 years ago

How many of the things you mentioned are free themselves or also bankrolled by ads? Meaningless comparison as far as I can tell.

Charuru• 16 years ago

> On a more serious note, I really don't see why everyone is getting so excited about their devices becoming dumb terminals and giving away their power to corporations that own the cloud.

Because it is enormously more efficient from a societal point of view.

The important thing is to have choice, many providers, many platforms, and prevent lock-in.

> Furthermore, they are competing unfairly: they use their ads profits to dump products on the market at very low prices or for free, killing the (possible) competition. For now this has been good for the consumer, with two observations: you're not getting something for free, you're paying with your privacy; once google gets big enough it may get to be the only player in some markets and that always ends badly.

Rather than resist the coming of the cloud, instead support competitors to adsense/words. I can't be the only one who thinks that a free OS, free Docs, free [insert here] in return for letting Google know what kind of products I like is not just a good trade, for a fabulously excellent one.

I only worry that if Google might stop innovating if they get too big, which is why it's essential that Bing is around, and Yahoo, and DDG, and so on, and competitors like iAds that can make a dent in their ad business.

manish• 16 years ago

PG: The other road ahead, September 2001

The whole idea of "your computer" is going away, and being replaced with "your data." You should be able to get at your data from any computer. Or rather, any client, and a client doesn't have to be a computer.

buro9• 16 years ago

John Gage: "The network is the computer", 1984

There's not really much more to be said than that. Most people here are aware of the competing visions of that time, and Microsoft never quite got it as their business model depended on (depends on) a computer on every desk. Apple never quite got it either (though, a little more now). Sun got it (obviously). Google got it even more.

deadmansshoes• 16 years ago

I have a "smart phone" with Internet connection, but I've used it about 5 times in the last year. Its useful for checking emails but horrible to try and respond. If you actually need to do something on the net, you need a netbook or laptop..which needs Windows or Linux.

danparsonson• 16 years ago

I have a smart phone with an internet connection, which I use daily to send and receive email, read blogs, search with Google, look things up on Wikipedia, etc. In fact, virtually everything I do with Chrome/FF on my Windows PC, held back only by a somewhat non-standards-compliant browser, which will apparently be fixed with the next major release of Blackberry OS. I send virtually all my personal email using my phone now (I keep it away from my work email account).

j_baker• 16 years ago

I think that everyone is looking for microsoft's Waterloo to come, which I don't think will ever happen. MS is fighting a war of attrition where their monopoly is slowly getting gnawed away. If Linux, a renewed Apple, and Google didn't kill Microsoft, how will some pidly little thing like the cloud?

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

MS missed the chance to marginally extend Windows relevance by making Visual Studio more accessible and relevant. The "architect" and "testing" versions of the IDE are ludicrously expensive. And even though they claim VS2010 is better for JScript development (the MS name for javascript), it's still an inadequate IDE for javascript.

I would think the point of VS is to sell copies of the OS, office, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Not to be a profit center on its own.

It's too late to attract independent and small web developers, but perhaps they could extend their life with corporate development by making all versions of VS free, even open sourcing it, and fix the editor so you can collapse down javascript code by curly bracket pairs now, don't wait for VS2012.

A real shame. The .NET Framework, C#, Linq, and from what I gather F# were all conceived and carried out very well.

pragmatic• 16 years ago

Hogwash.

I have more pc's than ever. Everyone I know has one or two. So now we have multiple copies of windows out there PLUS an android phone and apple device in a household.

Microsoft doesn't have to lose for Google/Apple/Whomever to also prosper. It's not a zero sum game for one computer in a household. Multiple winners, not one loser.

The Windows Era is over...

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