Microsoft is a dinosaur, the future is Chrome

jhay — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:53:48 +0000

Still unable to blog regularly due to a stressful weekend and week opener, more on this tomorrow, but I’d like to share a few links and scribbles on why Microsoft is stuck in the Jurassic age – so to speak.

First up, the great Mike Abundo becomes bluntly honest is saying that the second Microsoft Ad featuring Jerry Seinfeld and company founder Bill Gates are nothing but “lies”

First, Gates claims he’s “connected over a billion people.” Nonsense. Gates was famously late to the Internet.
Second, Seinfeld claims Gates will make possible an “amoeba with a blog.” Ha! The world’s most popular blogging platforms don’t even come from Microsoft.

I followed the link he shared and Time does drive home the point:

Bill Gates: PC Genius, Internet Fool

Bill Gates, who for years was the richest man in the world, is also one of the smartest. But even he couldn’t figure out how to beat the Internet — how to transition his grand old monopoly software company, Microsoft, into a business that thrives on the Net. And so he begins his retirement today from Microsoft as the PC era’s biggest winner, and the Web era’s most spectacular casualty.

The article’s conclusion, that either Microsoft reboots itself or perish is expanded upon by this related article from the New York Times which puts forward the notion that Windows needs to get a serious breather and shakedown:

A MONOLITHIC operating system like Windows perpetuates an obsolete design. We don’t need to load up our machines with bloated layers we won’t use. We need what Mr. Silver and Mr. MacDonald speak of as a “just enough” operating system. Additional functionality, appropriate to a given task, can be loaded as needed.

But perhaps, it is already too late for Microsoft and Windows because Google is here and it has unleashed what could be called the final piece of its plan to totally overthrow Microsoft from its dominance of how we use computers and the Internet.

Newsweek spells it out perfectly: The Cloud’s Chrome Lining

“There’s been a lot of renewal of interest in browsers in the last 18 months or so,” says Mike Wolf, director of ABI Research. And indeed, Chrome isn’t your average browser.

Google already offers a suite of software applications online–in the cloud–for free: You can check your Gmail, type up a memo on Google docs, manage your photos with Picasa, read all your favorite sites with Google Reader, and store it all on Google’s servers–allowing you to access it from any computer. Google Chrome takes all those applications and serves them up in one neat package–almost exactly like (watch out, Redmond) an online operating system. “Chrome’s a further reflection of the fact that the nature of the Web is changing from a place where we go to read pages of information, to where we go to run software applications,” says Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.”

Perhaps it’s still too early to say anything conclusive. But at the way things are going at present, Microsoft really needs to do a lot of serious soul-searching if it wants to stay on top or the new ads are only stating the obvious that like Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft has now become but a living memory of the glory days of the 80′s and 90′s.

The Four-eyed Journal » Chrome

Microsoft is a dinosaur, the future is Chrome