In another era, your rationale would be valid, but you know the reason most people are buying computers these days? I'll give you a hint. It begins with an I and you're on it right now.
People don't need the latest in billy g's bloatware to get on the web.
Faster graphics are great, but Nintendos and Play Stations offer a wider variety of killer games that blow the doors off anything the Pentium II (even with a dedicated pci 3d accelerator board) can manage. And they're building internet capability into these devices! Without Bill's help.
The impending bandwidth explosion will further move attention away from the desktop to the internet, allowing a whole new class of applications that will compete (very successfully) for the consumer's dollar. Computing is moving away from desktop to network centric. Future apps will differentiate themselves not so much on what they do locally, but on what they do remotely and how they interact with others. This is the domain of Java/CORBA, which is free and open, allows universal interconnectivity to any device running any OS, and runs just as well on Win95 as it will on 98 - Or Mac, Unix, MVS, VMS, etc, etc. |
