Does Windows still matter?
That’s the intriguing title of an article in the New York Times by Joe Nocera. He writes:
But it seems to me that even without the browser-as-platform, Windows is already dying a death by a thousand cuts. Yes, Microsoft still makes billions by selling pre-installed Windows via computer manufacturers. But ever-so-gradually, the Internet is upending its business model just as surely as it has upended models for the music, television and newspaper businesses. It is also true, as Mr. Gapper notes, that Bill Gates saw this coming many years ago — and sounded the alarm in a famous memo to Microsoft’s executives. But in the subsequent decade-plus, the company has been unable to keep it from happening.
Think about it: do you really care anymore which operating system you use? I don’t. For years, I owned both a PC and a Mac. I could use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox, more or less interchangeably, to access the Internet. I could write an article on one computer, send it via an email message to the other one, and it worked just fine. Ditto for PowerPoint, spreadsheets, and many of the other applications most people use — including Apple’s iTunes. Even my teenage sons, who stuck with Windows because most computer games were written for PCs, stopped caring. They could play games over the Internet, and all the most popular games were made for the Mac as well. I’m convinced that iTunes and the iPhone are not the only reasons Mac is gaining market share. The other is that people have come to realize that they do not really need Windows anymore. Any ol’ operating system will do. The browser and the Internet have already rendered them largely irrelevant.
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True for home and very small business.
Different story for enterprise (although creating “cloud computing” on a company’s intranet could have a seismic impact on OS).