"Analyst" Conjures Up a Load of Cow Dung

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/The-Windows-era-is-over/1274899297' target='_blank'>http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/a...over/1274899297</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"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. The day of Windows' reckoning is come: 2010 will mark dramatic shifts away from Microsoft's monopoly to something else. Change is inevitable, and like IBM in the 1980s, Microsoft can't hold back its destiny during this decade. The Windows era is over."</em></p><p>Seriously, how do analysts like these get paid? I want some of that money too. This article is terribly written in many ways, but I'll point out the real crux of the issue that is not addressed: there are no real statistics to show that both actual content consumption and creation are actually shifting away from desktops and notebooks (which mostly run Windows) in the article whatsoever. <MORE /></p><p>Also, I find the idiocy in proclaiming that cloud computing will kill the Windows OS too much to take. Are we returning to the era of 1970s mainframe computing? Most modern cloud services do offload some computing tasks to the client, and to do so it means the client needs to be running a fairly robust... OS. Which is likely to be Windows anyway, using a browser of some kind. Would a browser-based OS (like Google's Chrome OS) kill Windows? It's hard to say, but I'm confident to say that people still like apps on their computers, and going forward it's likely we'll use a mix of local and cloud computing.</p><p>On the photography front, I can't imagine not using a proper computer for organising, editing and sharing my images. Even mainstream casual snappers use their computers for that too, just at a different level. Maybe when the first camera that gets a Flickr uploader built-in may we see a decline in people using computers for digital photography.</p><p>To end, I'd like to offer an anecdote from my last job: The owners of the company were so paranoid with IT security that we were forced to use thin clients connected to a server in another country. The result of this was that as the company expanded, the systems got slower and slower. On some days it was just hard to do work, with the server taking micro-second freezes every several minutes. With that, I proclaim that the era of thin-client should be over, given my crappy experience with it!</p>

[Reid Kistler]

Well, am not going to HOLD MY BREATH waiting for Windows to go away! :eek:

Can certainly see more competition - heck, we have that already - and would not be shocked to see "Windows" become a MINORITY player in the OS field, depending on what definitions are used (how device categories are split up).

Pure speculation here, but let's suppose Tablet sales really take off - much as cell phones (including smartphones) have - and Apple / Google (Android) / Linux end up on the majority. IF "everybody" has a tablet (as "everybody" now has a cell phone) the number of tablets could well exceed the number of Traditional Computers (Desktops / Laptops), and Windows could find itself in a minority position, EVEN WHILE Actual Sales remain level, or possibly slightly increase.

Now, in my opinion, Tablets should be considered apart from Traditional Computers: Tablets appear to be almost exclusively reserved for Content Consumption, whereas Desktops / Laptops are better suited for Content Creation. MS might be unhappy at failing to "own" the Tablet market, but the immediate impact on the traditional computer market would be minor.

However, to the extent that the population of Content Consumers is growing faster than the population of Content Creators, one could reasonably assume that the sale of Tablets will increase faster than the sale of Desktops / Laptops.

And if Apple / Google / Linux gain a majority in Tablet OS installations (over Windows), then more people will become familiar with those OSs - which could eventually lead to a greater usage on Content Creation systems, given sufficient robustness and the availability of competitive applications (as compared to Windows & the vast number of compatible applications it can run).

Hmm: if we backtrack one more level - that is, from Cell Phones to Tablets - maybe it IS important that MS is able to get Windows Mobile 7 back in the race!

As for "Cloud Computing," my guess is that we will need significant infrastructure improvements before remote based apps are ready to replace local apps - at least for the majority of users.

Then again, as our computer systems become more-and-more simply another Consumption Device - much like a TV or Radio.... Well, the next generation can worry about it! :confused:

[ptyork]

Wow, almost exactly what Reid said...mind reading freak!!

It's creation vs. consumption and (probably more-so) the growth of multi-device households. It'll definitely stay dominant on creation devices for a while yet, but Microsoft's truly sickening lack of a unified consumption device vision (again with my Ballmer-hate) certainly makes it very apt to make comparisons with IBM. But whether MS is a real player in the consumption device market or not, the era of Windows-on-a-PC as the dominant end-user computing device IS ending--and much more rapidly than I had once thought possible.

[doogald]

If there is any analyst who can compete with Rob Enderle for a regular diet of analytical "huh?", it's Joe Wilcox. I'm not even going to click that link to read it - I'm sure its main intention is link bait for the ads on his page.