Why Windows Needs ‘the Cloud’ To Fail

      by Wyatt Walter

Buzzwords and hype aside, the world is moving towards a web-based future. This future inevitably means that our workstations are no longer our “application servers”, but we are starting to shift that responsibility and that management into the data center. It just makes sense. Bandwidth has become drastically more available and we have become increasingly mobile, leaving traditional desktop applications in the dust. This shift in paradigms, however, causes one of two things to happen. Either we a) build plugins into existing desktop applications such as Microsoft Office to accommodate these changes, or b) we stop using desktop applications altogether (or mostly). While “option a” is definitely a viable option, we would really be using a workaround to allow old technologies to work with new techniques for accessing information.

As this shift away from dependence on traditional desktop applications happens, we become increasingly dependent upon browsers. Since a majority of browsers are fairly cross-platform, the dependence upon the platform of the operating system is suddenly stripped away as well. A vast majority of Linux haters’ complaints about Linux revolve around file sharing, permissions, and application compatibility. If we start to depend upon web-based applications, suddenly those issues are no longer issues that the desktop operating system has to handle, thus Linux becomes a much more viable, cheaper option for users. Shares and permissions issues will be handled through their respective web applications. Application dependencies and compatibility will become the responsibility of the server administrators, not the end user. That makes even a $122.99 (from Newegg) price tag on a Windows Vista Upgrade license look pretty steep.

If this paradigm should come to completion (or at least completion for most users), the world’s dependence upon the Windows platform will be no more. We won’t need to have our PCs on a domain with Windows Group Policy. We won’t need to depend upon Windows-only libraries or applications. We even don’t have to depend upon media players (assuming all the web multimedia vendors play fairly).

This, of course, is all hypothetical, but it has to be in the back of the mind of Microsoft executives. Linux and Apple don’t currently control a very large market share, however, they pose a huge threat indirectly through ‘cloud computing’ to the traditional software licensing software used by Microsoft. Red Hat has all but conceded victory to Microsoft in the traditional desktop world where we depend upon desktop-based applications. However, they are working towards meeting Microsoft where the battle is moving.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Mar 26th, 2009