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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

If you had asked in 1994 what would kill Windows/Office, would you have understood the answer of "people want to socialize with their friends"?

The same thing will happen here for a timeline of 5-10 years: Facebook will likely be the dominant player in an old and boring space called social networking.

Maybe virtual reality will be big (people walking around with really helpful devices in their pockets/on their eyes), or something you can't even think of.

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What killed Windows: the Internet and mobile devices have made the desktop OS less relevant, combined with healthy competition from Apple.

What killed Office: once again, the Internet is making desktop applications obsolete. Enter Google docs.

Socialization is in a different market than office productivity, so "people wanting to socialize with their friends" killing "Windows/Office" seems a non sequitur.

Both office and windows are still massive cash cows for Microsoft, I guess Facebook could do the same thing, slowly become less relevant while still controlling a massive market and turning massive profits.

Of course Facebook still seem much more nimble in their space, maybe they will be able to jump in early on the next big thing.

The only problem with this argument is that Windows and Office are both more popular than they've ever been and industry-wide, people are purchasing more desktop/laptop/notebook PCs per year than ever before. So if by "dead" you mean "more popular than ever" then I guess this argument holds water.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/

It's true that of late the focus has been mobile, mobile, mobile, and Microsoft missed the boat here to a degree, but only in comparison to what Apple did, which is start a revolution around the idea of easy, mobile devices. This is a completely different market than the desktop market, and the popularity of one doesn't mean the death of the other. By the way, people have been calling for the death of the desktop since the 80s. 90s. 00s. Hasn't happened yet. Down the road...who knows.

Perhaps "dead" is hyperbole and "past-its-prime" is more accurate. Microsoft is still huge, but its hegemony is starting to wane.

You're right, and I think they are starting to sense it. This presents an interesting parallel universe in which Microsoft actually starts to channel some of that famous "underdog" energy that Steve Jobs himself channeled.

Lately I've actually heard sympathy for Microsoft in areas that used to be viciously anti-MS. It seems some of the hatred for MS has been transferred to Apple, and to a lesser extent, over to Google. But that's probably my subjective experience. I do think to the extent Microsoft can go lean, hungry, and humble, it will go better for them in the years to come.

I think in the immediate feature innovative mobile products could unseat a lot of the current platforms, many of which have been slow to (or done so poorly) implement mobile interfaces.

I think just like we've moved from desktop to web applications you're going to see a similar move from web to mobile interfaces. This is will be especially true of social networking platforms.

Google has direct control of one of the major upcoming mobile operating systems and because they host the contact/relationship graph I think they could make a confident push into Facebook's space if they were so inclined.

They have been trying - see orkut and buzz.

Yeah, except that Windows and Office is as popular (if not more popular) than ever.

I'm also not sure how 'people socializing with their friends' has had any impact on the Operating System and Office Productivity space either way?

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