October 23rd, 2006
IT Dreamscape: Did Om Malik just enter Bill Gates' nightmare?
The movie Dreamscape is based on the premise that if you die in your dream, you'll die in real life. So, the bad guys send hitman Tommy Ray Glatman (played by David Patrick Kelley) into the President's (Eddie Albert) dream to kill the President but Alex Gardner (played by Dennis Quaid) enters the President's dream as well to stop Glatman. The story ends happily (well, not if you're Glatman). To this date, it's one of my favorite sci-fi flicks.
So, is Om Malik the hitman in Bill Gate's dream? In a Business 2.0 piece headlined Microsoft's big nightmare: free online apps, Malik writes:
If you're a developer or startup, you are suddenly free to write a browser-based application and quit worrying about which operating system, chip, or device your consumers are using.
It's a scary thought for anyone who built a business around proprietary formats. But for the end user, this is the kind of future that Andreessen on his best days - and maybe Gates on his worst - had envisioned.
Update: I just realized that in the IT version of Dreamscape, Dennis Quaid plays the part of Ray Ozzie
