Re-evolution

Seeing the Windows8 vid got me thinking both in terms of possibilities but also the general direction of the industry. For a long time your OS choice depended on what you wanted to do, office activity, mainstream PC usage and gaming was Windows, Apple had the more arts and crafts with some devs and Linux was hardcore computer folks who loved re-writing drivers to hook up a printer. Then Linux started being more user friendly and cooler, Apple got more and more "one click to rule them all" simplistic, windows was... well loosing market share with Vista and regaining some with Windows 7. And then iOS hit tablets and Android emerged and Blackberry OS went tablet and Windows Phone 7 looked like a flash website. With the rise of the tablet and more and more crossover between home laptop usage and smartphone/tablet PC usage one begins to wander if home computing will remain the same.

Sure, sure there will always be enthusiasts building C games on a Linux machine, web devs running a server in their basement but the average user who only recently got a laptop and figured out the intricacies of a mouse (you know the folks who buy software) are giving up their mouse and laptop for the tablet/Smartphone combo. I guess what I am trying to get to is that there is a brave new world out there a mobile computing evolution with the internet coming out to the real world and interacting with it. A world of possibility but also a world without a particular shape.

What strikes me as peculiar is that Microsoft, who is significantly behind in getting that mobile computing market share, would so bravely pick up the glove and enter the mobile arena by acknowledging it's significance via the UI design of Windows 8 which has been traditionally the flagship of their products. As the market becomes more fractured and monopolies fall MS being brave is not only fresh but also risky business. Heaven forbid if the mobile OSes start invading home computer systems and high school students copy/paste from wikipedia using their docked smartphone what market will remain of traditional windows apps? What is it exactly that we do at home for entertainment that a tablet cannot accommodate? And why stop there, what exactly is a manager doing at work that a docked Blackberry cannot replace his computer? Do we even need DSL/wire-line phones and cable TV in a 4G world? Is TV even relevant in a streaming/torrent world?

The world's changing around us and Microsoft is jumping in the deep end, it will probably work out for them in the end and Google will either beat Oracle or work around it's lawsuits maybe there is even room for Playbooks and whatever tablet will carry Windows 8. But what is truly amazing is the world of possibilities that this new round of electronic evolution will bring good time to be alive and even better time to understand what a compiler is.

Till next time,
Stratos out.