The Windows Era is over...
betanews.com
betanews.com
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.
An economy where everybody gets their products / utilities from charities ... is called communism ;)
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 ;)
That specific case I view as a good thing, since turn-by-turn GPS data was provided by an oligopoly for high fees, which is a lot more "unfair" to everybody.
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.
Not in the 80s that I remember. Back then you didn't have a network, or portable file formats, and even the floppy disks - if they were the same size - were formatted differently for every operating system, and switching to another OS often meant switching to a different machine with a different architecture (and machines were damned expensive back then!), and you couldn't expect to take any applications, peripherals, and probably data with you. And those are pressures that apply to those who probably only had one system. If you were a business with more than one microcomputer, or you needed to share data with someone else, then the cost of switching was enormous.
In the 80s I lived through, Microsoft was already busy building their empire by keeping customers captive on the upgrade treadmill. We were kept on the treadmill through the high cost of switching, and through the fear of incompatibility with whatever we might want to switch to.
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?
All of my emails are also downloaded through POP3, not because I think they might be evil ... it's just because I'm not always online and because I don't trust the reliability of anyone (worked in a data-center and I know that shit can happen even when you don't have a single point of failure).
Normal people might get affected, but really, people learn from their mistakes ... as I said, trust and reputation are at the core of any society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.