Microsoft is...

…dead!

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they’d positioned themselves as a “media company” instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn’t understand. It was as if I’d told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

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Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called “Ajax.” And that was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

“[E]veryone can see the desktop is over.” What does this mean for the “GNOME … and Development Platform”?

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.

Living in a college town, I can certainly relate to this. The number of students toting Apple hardware—iBooks, MacBooks, and iPods—seems significantly greater than that of students carrying Dell or HP laptops around. Whether at the library or in any of Athens’ coffee houses, all tables belong to Apple’s shiny white plastic machines.