

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

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blub
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.

~~~
bad_user
> _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
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.

~~~
bad_user
> _so they can create product in another category (for example GPS), and offer
> it for free_

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.

~~~
loewenskind
Who gets to decide which kinds of businesses are allowed to make money and
which must be free?

~~~
glhaynes
Usually the market.

~~~
loewenskind
Really? So when one company is getting all its revenue from ads and gives
things away free in other market segments it is _the market_ that decided
those areas weren't worth anything? Care to sight any credited economics
sciences people who explain this?

~~~
glhaynes
I don't mean market as just being purchasers but the overall market of
suppliers, consumers, and, of course, regulation.

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

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TomOfTTB
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
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.

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jackfoxy
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.

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

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manish
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
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.

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pragmatic
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.

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deadmansshoes
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
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).

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j_baker
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?

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c00p3r
It was over in 2003. It's time to consider the ends of iPhone and Facebook
eras. =)

