"microsoft is dead"

so says paul graham

now M$ is certainly doing a stirling job of commiting suicide, and the market is moving away from the desktop - and M$ has shown a complete inability to handle any market other than the desktop, with only the xbox bucking that trend - but to say its dead?

the problem here is that many developers have only the briefest of contact with planet earth, and whilst they're busy wanking over web 2.0 and internet applications they don't seem to realize they represent a vanishingly small proportion of developments.

SMEs and SOHOs - who occupy around 80% of the available development market - want desktop apps, so no, the desktops not going away anytime soon and neither is M$.

when - and its a long way of this when - the desktop app does finally die then, yes, M$ is finished is a business because world+dog will have migrated to apple since M$ simply cannot compete in terms of 'kewl', media savvy or innovation with apple.

and of course the comedy here is that this guys suprised when he finds someone running windows. well fuck, thats like being stunned at finding people not bobbing around in porches. maybe he'd like to look at the market share - apples has dropped since the arrival of vista, btw - where apple has a rather minimal share.

i just spent 5 minutes typing a comment in repsonse to his article and got a dead link page.

which seemed appropriate for an article announcing the dominion of the interwebby future of applications...

The author of the article has some pretty strong opinions there, and he may even be right. But the tone of the article is obviously colored by the elephant sized chip the dude obviously has on his shoulder regarding MS.

What he predicts may come to pass, or, as I think more likely, it will sort of come to pass but not in the way he predicts. Either way, he'd come across as more credible if his obvious blatant hatred of MS didn't seep from every line of copy.

desktop power is cheap. For the price of so called "internet appliances" a few years back (that sure fizzled, didn't it?) you can have a high powered PC (albeit with mediocre graphics). PC workstations are not going away.

Webmail makes perfect sense (although I have yet to see one that integrates with a PDA well or at all), a web based office suite does not. I would not want to rely on a web application when I have a project due.

How long has it been since you've seen a non-windows PC? Unless you have one sitting in front of you I bet it's been a while.

How long has it been since you saw someone use another office suite than MS?

I think MS won the war, and that's why they don't seem so formidable. Let's hope they remain benevolent.

True Marso, but from a Linux user, as well as a windows end user standpoint, (notice I said end user) MS IMO is simply beating a dead horse.

The expansion and usability of the open source software has come a long way. With the ever flourishing GUI , I can accomplish most of everything that a windows desktop can , at a more detailed and informational level. The learning here never ceases. As to where MS feels they need not show there code, therefore when there is an issue, one cannot see , and attempt to repair. This is not the future.

Forgetting about the hackability, as this will and is comming up in open source software, I find the stability issues are on the linux side.Networking for me is much more simple and secure,as well as a small amount of development. I am able to have FTP servers, A GUI desktop, as well as very good office software with the ease of use, and not the extreme out of pocket cost.

Just my thoughts : )

Yep. The Internets are definitely winning.

i disagree, googles web apps is already attracting businesses who'll be able to get the level of functionality they want at a decent price - for the majority of M$ office users its a ridiculously overpowered piece of software as they've desperately tried to add features to make upgrading worthwhile.

adobe's apollo is going to add a whole new layer to this as you'll have web applications on the desktop allowing you to have that office functionality with the data stored on a server rather than spread across a network. in terms of collabaration its going to spawn a lot of 'killer apps' over the next 5 years, as you'll be able to type up that work anywhere in the world and store it on the companies servers.

they won the desktop war, but the battlegrounds shifting now and i don't think M$ has the necessary tools.

they're bringing knives to a gunfight.

Could be. The companies I'm associated with are a bit conservative.

I admit I'd cringe at buying a 5 license suite for home use (kid's PCs etc). I'm using office 2000 that I "borrowed" from work 7 years ago.

Edit: toured both "Google apps" and "open office". Neither are a substitute for MS Office.

Google apps is inappropriate for any kind of professional document. "Open Office" lacks outline view (pretty important for producing documents) and performs badly.

I suppose if you can't afford the price tag for MS Office these are better than nothing, but you get what you pay for...

You have to remember where Paul Graham is coming from: the world of startups. No respectable startup, at least and especially the ones with web-based products and services uses Windows. It's all LAMP or MAMP, eventually growing up to use Oracle or Postgres to replace MySQL. Nor do they fear competition from MS anymore. Now, everyone's worried about Google, and for good reason. It doesn't help MS that there's so little new software written for Windows, at least nothing exciting.

I don't buy that the great future for those web apps will happen anytime soon. They assume everybody can be online via broadband, all the time. But the ugly truth is that there are people who aren't online at all - and those who are come in via modem. All that glizzy stuff is useless to them. How big is broadband now? 30, 40%?

Maybe when there is WLAN access all over the place. But I don't see people who read their email over an old modem paying a premium to use all that stuff. I think all the hype is overshadowing the actual percentage of 'net users actually using it.

MS certainly isn't dead. They will die the day Linux actually becomes usable for mom and pop. Right now, Windows is what works and everybody knows it. What a few freaks do with their nights (namely, looking for alpha drivers for standard hardware in forums full of weird people) doesn't concern 99.999% of humanity. Linux has its place on servers.

Photoshop over the web? Most websites can't even keep up with simple demand when it comes to serving web pages, imagine what's going to happen when those servers now have to do intense computations.

Are you callin me a freak? Thats ok, I was a " freak " before freak was cool . lol

The trick is, to get involved to the point that you can write your own code. I believe thats where the future is. I'm sure there will always be room for a couple major players, Id'e be out of touch if I thought differently. As for the future " mainstream " I'm confident there will be much more involvement from those freaks we all talk about. Some of these young people have and will be much more involved w/ the science of computing , therfore they will be the wave of the future.

Try these:
http://portableapps.com/

mmm thanks. looks like I can get the open office executable that will fit on/run from a USB drive.

As much as I hate the idea of it, it seems like all the "Live" services are starting to converge and finally looking like a quality choice when compared with google or yahoo.

Of course, Microsoft's biggest weakeness is its own brand name.

Although MS doesn't have the very best webmail, search, etc, they have something in EVERY CATEGORY, and it is pretty well done. Personally I prefer to mix and match between the "best" of all the web offerings, but with the amount of integration with Live services, it is easy to see how they might pick up speed, especially when you look at the popularity of Xbox Live.

I used to think Xbox Live was pretty stupid but one of my roommates has a 360 and I have to say it is pretty well done. With the addition of Live network being used for "games for windows", I could see how MS could turn out to be in pretty good shape... having all your stuff tied together has a big convienence factor.

Of course they will still be in an epic struggle with google and to a lesser extent yahoo, as these groups also offer many connected services.

Hey, the 3Com Audrey sitting on my desk is beautiful, man.

In any case, web apps are so hilariously spotty right now that I really wouldn't want to run exclusively on them. I mean, hell, I'm running Opera, which is the closest to standards compliant web browser for Windows, and shit still breaks all the time because IE and the blessed child Firefox won't get their asses in gear.

However, I'm the guy who thinks that the whole idea of "web-based everything" is a bunch of bullshit in the first place, simply because the public tends to be much further behind in terms of connection speeds than what computer nerds would like to think.

Ultimately, I think the author is right, but not for a very long time for the reasons you cite. The bandwidth is not universally there, and another constraint is legacy apps. A business with an existing data infrastructure that works for its needs is not going to jump out to embrace web applications. That business will instead continue to buy windows machines that can run the legacy client application.

I do think new network applications will be designed around browsers rather than desktop clients, so upgrade cycles will eventually bring them on line (often on in house servers), but that is going to take some time. Unless another Y2K type hysteria arrives that convinces everybody to upgrade everything, then perhaps the desktop will die.

hence why i think apollo will play a major role in bringing web apps into an acceptable format. cross-platform and, with the container being part of the flash plugin, rapid deployment across the world, it should be The Next Big Thing. should be.

exactly, its why i laughed at the article - its an example of someone making a sweeping opinion on a small and inbred sample set.

Connection reliability is much more of a problem than speeds, especially given that web-based applications are being marketed primarily as business tools.

The US Postal Service has a lot of online apps and I don't know how many times I wished they made a desktop version. They can be absolutely slow as dirt.

I may come from the old school, but I'm not really that old. I like my files where I can control them, and most of the time that means having them in-hand, not stored on some server (or half-finished in cyberland).

In other news, I didn't know AJAX was that young.

If Microsoft were ever to flat out die, it would be because something really big and scary killed it.

Like Species 8472 smashing Borg cubes like ice.

So, when that day comes, run in the direction Microsoft was running before it croaked, something nightmarish is coming the other way.

lol. There is no way my company would store any information on server that wasn't protected in-house or depend on web applications.

MS is dead, lol, okay.

No, but would your company store data on an in house server with web applications as the front end? I think that's the real future for web apps, not the already discredited application service provider model.

all depends on company size, SMEs and SOHOs will eventually move that way for cost reasons but with a 2 or 3 tier system (machine data/local network data/remote network data) - similar to how stock tracking over multisite networks operate now.

the larger companies will shift to inhouse webservers exposing different functionality through intranet and extranet connections.

Web apps maybe stored on our own servers, possibly. Or web apps we develop on our own.

I don't see it happening even in the near future, our laptops all come bundled for a decent price. I don't see them buying laptops without Office licenses bundled and buying/licensing web apps, instead. We all have laptops, so what would we do if we decided to go work from home and didn't have internet access or even just broadband? Or, went on vacation and wanted to type some stuff up on the beach, without internet access? Or on the plane? What about our divisions in Sao Paulo which have terrible internet access reliablity?

I agree about Office or whatever is the next flavor of productivity software. But everything else is going to be platform independent and then MS becomes a company that makes Office, and not much else. In other words, a far less important player in the scheme of things.

The other problem I'm seeing is that wide-range connectivity still isn't quite there. Data connections for cell networks are still expensive, and a lot of corporations are sending their road warriors on out - that means they won't be able to work with online-only web apps without paying ridiculous sums of money. Even if the companies decide to shell out the bucks for data on cellular networks, that means that, very quickly, the cost of the online apps is offset.

And yeah, connection reliability is another big old issue.

I think there will always be a place for the local desktop and local desktop software. What I think will be big is synchronizing between the desktop apps and the web apps - in other words, making it so that you can get on any computer, anywhere, and have the same experience as using your own home machine. Once you're done, or at set intervals, it synchs up online so that your experience continues back at home base.

I don't see people jumping off the Windows bandwagon anytime soon, either. No other platform is viable for gaming and MS develops a lot of 3D technology which powers gaming today. Also, MS is centralizing their software so your PDA, Video Game Console, Laptop, Media Center, PC, etc. all work together, stream to each other, etc.

Until we're running 100mb fiber lines into our houses, I expect it to stay that way for a good while, too.