<< Regardless, of how it goes though, MSFT will continue to thrive >>
Suppose it's two or three years from now. You have a cable modem and a very low cost network PC.
Using the web browser, check your favorite web sites, including SI. Still in the browser, check your email.
Still in the browser, you want to do some word processing. Click and download the word processing software of your choice (the cable modem is so fast it takes less time to do this than to start up the word processor from the hard disk on that old PC you used to use). Because the word processor is written in Java, it runs in ... your browser.
Open that letter you are working on. (People used to worry about sending their credit card over the net, but that was a couple of years ago. Now everything gets sent over the net -- you store your letters and most everything there. Or perhaps you have a high capacity floppy add-on for sensitive documents.)
Even though it's just an inexpensive network computer, it still has a powerful chip and lots of memory, so you can do serious computing. (Remember those people who said it was just a dumb terminal? Boy, were they wrong.)
You can even do work on even more powerful remote computers too, making your old PC look like it has no power at all. And because the cable connection is so fast, all the display appears on your network PC -- you might as well have the extraodinarily powerful computer sitting right next to you.
Windows 95? Windows 98? Nobody uses that anymore. Nobody needs a bloated operating system to operate a PC. Nobody wants to put up with all that. They just snap on their network PC and go.
The browser and a network computer will provide the simplicity and low cost that people will love. The fast, fast, fast cable modem will bring to them all the amazing software they want -- in a snap.
I think Microsoft is desperate to keep us on the expensive PC, bloated operating system, bloated software track. Hey, they've got a monopoly. But things are starting to slip. They've taken some desparate measures lately to destroy the competition (Netscape), and have landed in front of a federal judge as a result.
Loosing the current case could be the first crack in the wall for Microsoft.
How quickly things can change. Did the web even exist three years ago?
Companies can become has-beens so fast. Whatever happened to Wang? Didn't they used to have the #1 word processor? In a short amount of time they were out of the picture. Today most 20-something webmasters probably never even heard of them. Oh well. |
