July 23rd, 2007
By 2010, will Windows 'Seven' (or any desktop OS) really matter?
There’s probably no better example of how Microsoft seems to be sweeping left while the rest of the computing world sweeps right than today’s edition of ZDNet Tech Update Today (the newsletter that we send out daily to those who’ve subscribed to it).
The lead story in that newsletter (which, as one of the editors of the newsletter, I draw attention to), points to fellow blogger Dion Hinchcliffe’s discussion of a bumper crop of new mashup platforms. Whereas mashup development has skyrocketed in the last year, enterprises represent one stronghold where the relatively recent approach to rapid application development has yet to really break through. Hinchcliffe considers the reasons why (my take: mashups are still a little too brittle for mission critical stuff) but also points out how most if not all of the 17 mashup development platforms he identified target the enterprise.
Meanwhile, in the same newsletter, Dan Farber’s top “pick” (this, in our estimation, is the second most important story of the day) points to Mary Jo Foley’s discussion of 2010 as the target delivery timeframe for “Windows Seven.”
Today, I’m a user of both Windows XP and Windows Vista and while I remain convinced that Vista is a better OS than XP, my usage of XP serves as a constant reminder that when it comes to getting my work done, I’m not getting it done any faster or better in Vista. In fact, because of the way several things have been moved around in Vista, and because of the way Internet Explorer 7, in an effort to protect us from ourselves, locks up the Web in a chastity belt, I often find myself being slowed down by Vista. It may only be a matter of time before I get used to it (and figure out how to reconfigure IE7 with the necessary wiggle room). But the bottom line is that (a) I’m definitely not more productive and (b) if I finally get to a point where I am more productive, it won’t be by much.
One reason that my productivity hasn’t improved much is that I find myself spending more and more time in my browser (accessing Web applications). Wordpress (as one example) is our platform of choice for publishing blogs and it’s all done in a browser. I hardly ever do any word processing any more and when I do, I do it with Google Docs because of how (1) I can access that document from anywhere, even without my computer and (2) how easy it is to share those documents with others. Banking? Done in my browser. Attendee tracking for Mashup Camp? Done in my browser. E-Mail? Not inlcuding corporate e-mail (for which a browser-based client — Outlook Web Access — exists), so much of what I do, I do it in a browser.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s getting much tougher to win on the basis of browser differentiation. Especially when your browser only runs on one operating system. Also, unfortunately for Microsoft, the pendulum is going to keep swinging in the browser’s direction. Maybe not entirely. There’ll always be some room for desktop apps (two I use religiously are Snag-It and Photoshop.
But, by 2010, when, according to Mary Jo, the next version of Windows is likely to debut, the questions for Microsoft will be how far will the pendulum have swung by then and, to the extent that we’re living in a browser-based world (or even a rich Internet app world where Silverlight is Microsoft’s play), what difference if any can a new version of Windows make?
In fairness to Microsoft, what choice does it have but to eventually come out with a new version of Windows (as well as Office) every so often? Also in fairness to Microsoft, it’s not like the company hasn’t grokked the swinging pendulum either. Like Google, eBay, Yahoo, and other API providers, not only has Microsoft been rolling out a variety of APIs for consumption by Web-based applications (eg: the Virtual Earth API), as Don Hinchcliffe points out, it’s currently alpha testing Popfly. According to Microsoft’s Web site for Popfly:
We believe that if you can send an email, you should be able to build and personalize your own website, mashup, social networking site, or blog….
…..Popfly applications run on the client Web browser and are not designed for server-side processing…..You need IE 6, IE 7, or Firefox 2.0. We support IE 6 and 7 (Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista) and Firefox 2 (Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X)….
….You need Silverlight…..
Even with the Silverlight part (no small caveat given the dominance of other similar runtimes like Adobe’s Flash and Sun’s Java), Microsoft’s Popfly in no small way acknowledges the direction that the pendulum is swinging.
Personally speaking, that swing could come soon enough. It’s not that I have anything against Windows, Linux, the Mac OS or any other operating system. But, recently, I experienced two major upgrades. One was to the Summer 2007 version of salesforce.com. The other was to Vista. Upgrading to the Summer 2007 version of salesforce.com was very painful (not). Basically, it involved pressing the refresh button on my browser (continued below)…
…..(continued from above) One minute, I had the old version. The next minute, the new. As for Vista? Well, let’s just say it wasn’t that simple. And to be clear, I’m not singling out Vista because it’s Windows or it’s from Microsoft. Had the newsletter juxtaposed the ever-growing mashup ecosystem with a story about the next version of OS X or Linux, I would have said the exact same thing. What do you think?
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