[LINK] Microsoft is dead
Alastair Rankine
arsptr at internode.on.net
Sun Apr 8 16:25:01 AEST 2007
On 07/04/2007, at 5:44 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> Microsoft is dead:
> http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Concludes thus:
> I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the
> readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable
> company, and that I should be more careful about drawing
> conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little
> "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain
> that this is old news.
Count me among the older half.
Graham's premise is that web-based applications are going to make the
desktop -- and hence Microsoft but curiously not Apple -- obsolete.
All clever Ajax-y tricks aside, does anyone really think this is
going to happen for all applications? They will all be rendered into
the browser from some hosted service somewhere?
Actually I agree with another of Graham's (actually Tim O'Reilly's)
premises, namely that we should be looking at alpha geeks to see
where the future lies. And it seems obvious to me that the alpha
geeks *are* currently tied to their desktops; this is where they run
editors, compilers and debuggers, in order to create the next great
web app.
It seems obvious to me that the desktop *does* matter. Custom desktop
applications that make web applications better (I call these "hybrid"
web/desktop apps) are common now and will become more so in the
future. (More here: http://girtby.net/articles/2005/9/6/ical-ucal-we-
all-cal )
Windows will become irrelevant if it fails to attract enough
developers to produce these hybrid apps. There is no sign that
Windows is lagging in this respect.
Microsoft certainly should be worried that the alpha geeks are all
running MacOS or Linux these days. But Microsoft still has a long way
to fall.
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