The name Vista might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business, writes John Dvorak. Microsoft’s reign as the OS dominator may end fast if things going by the excitement that it the news had been able to create.Years have passed since the product was first specified and the company with all the resources in the world could not develop its promised file system that would help users out of the multigigabyte morass of confused data. In the case of Vista, Microsoft should have adopted an old IBM trick for product development: parallel teams working on the same thing at the same time to create a faux competition. If there is no competition outside the company it's now apparent that Microsoft cannot generate any internal impetus. The languishing of Internet Explorer until recently is a perfect example of this. Some likely competitive plays:
Apple : Once the new Mac OS appears next year it will gravitate toward the existing x86 community much more rapidly than anticipated. The Mac OS is already better than Windows in its modern look and feel as well as its functionality. Many smart people use Mac laptops today.
Microsoft will retreat to its cash-cow applications: Microsoft Office and the potentially profitable Xbox. Microsoft's Xbox gamble may actually keep the company on a long term growth path.
Linux/Apache will own the server space and with the emergence of MySQL and PHP as the hot development tools over Microsoft .NET and J2EE there will be no way to unseat it.
Google will dominate the Internet and online applications. So there will be four dominant software forces each in a niche. Google's next frontier is to break into the AOL/MSN space.
Apple needs to move its OS from a niche play to mainstay force. If the world changed tomorrow to 85 percent Mac "OS x86" its laptop sales alone would triple overnight. Google could do an OS that could threaten both Apple and Microsoft. This company's ability to come up with cool concepts puts even Apple to shame. And Google is already part of the LAMP camp. John speculates that one odd possibility would be a Google Linux that is Mac OS X– (or Windows-) compatible with a more Googly interface.
Kingsley Idehan highlights that Windows in its current incarnation fails to provide a productive working environment,with either a plethora of viruses and spyware contending for computing resources, or with all the software in place to protect against these assaults rendering the computing resources equally busy. The computing power lag is simply too much when using windows, and this is its achilles heel! More importantly he confirms that he has been able to move wholesale from Windows to Mac OS X and remain functional actually migrating over 6 years worth of emails, contacts, presentations, documents, spreadsheets from Windows to Mac OS X. and notes that he had success extended all the way to data linked documents that are transparently bound to back-end databases ( the norm rather the exception via ODBC) and highlights that he now uses Mac OS X as the prime working platform while using Windows as the platform remains strategic for all product offerings. Indeed interesting competition and options ahead in the desktop segment.
Category :Microsoft
|
