From the yawn-inducing Vista to, well, practically everything else, Microsoft's dominance seems to be reaching an eclipse. A couple of interesting Cnet articles encapsulate why Google, amogst others, could soon take over The Beast from Redmond's dominant position by shifting the operating system (or the platform, at least) onto the Web and away from the PC.
Well I to like to dream of the day when I mention the word "Microsoft" in a sentence and a kid next ot my say "Micro-What?" but I doubt that shifting the OS to the net is going to work out. After all remeber Web TV. no printer no hard drive no brains.
Yeah, but WebTV was just a stripped down PC, and it was ten years ago. The web has evolved considerably since then; just look at all the Web 2.0 companies with open APIs like Google, Flickr, etc. A lot of what you used to need on a PC has already shifted to the Web. I don't think the PC will ever get phased out, but as long as it performs some basic functions you can offload a lot to the web, and put bits and pieces of that on other devices. For instance, I'm not going to cut video on my phone, but Google Maps would be pretty damn useful.
If you don't believe that the web is where applications of the future will run, you have to read up on AJAX and Web 2.0... it's already happening.
The question is whether or not the web will largely run on open standards and APIs like google's, or on some of the proprietary stuff MS is trying to pass off in Vista... they have a couple things in Vista that are potentially killer apps, and Apple is a long way from any kind of significant market share... (hell, there are more people out there with Playstations or Xboxes than Macs, and those machines are fast becoming capable of doing a lot of the stuff people use PCs for now... if you have a web browser on your Xbox, you could use a lot of the web apps right now...)
Its not that there will not be application running off the web. but lets face it there is only so much band width, and the more people that you have running a shared app off a net work the slower everthing starts to run or the server its on crashes. As for market share I don't think it will matter whether or not you are running a mac, linix, or what ever flavour of MS windows out there.
Bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue, and Google has proven an app doesn't necessarily slow down. Hell, Slashdot proved that, at least on its own site. Some rinky dink site it highlights, on the other hand...:)
There are already thousands of web based applications... Google Maps and Flickr are two of the most shiny and new ones out there.
Bandwidth is a non-issue... big sites don't run off a single server, they use outfits like Akamai to distribute the load and serve up the site on whatever server farm is closest to the user...
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