Wednesday 22 April 2009

Future history of Windows

This is a nice opinion piece on the possible future of computing under the "good enough revolution" in which (apparently) people will realise that they don't need all the gunk and extras that windows and new pcs offer and in fact buy to replace not upgrade.

This seems plausible as a general idea. The market share for Linux, while still not huge (less that 1% I think), is still slowwly growing. With netbooks making good use of the free and lighter running Linux it is possible that they will carve a niche for themselves. That being said the soon to be released Windows 7 marks is specifically targetted at netbooks and with most computers still pre-installed with windows I think 2025 quoted is a little optimistic for Microsoft's death.

Amusingly this is a rare time in which this is published from XP (I refuse to run F/Vista) although 7 does look nice. Every time I log back onto windows it annoys me now - in fact the only use I have for it now is gaming and I'm hoping that with some summer work I can shift to wine for this.

All in all the next 10 years may be make or break for Linux as a major OS (ie greater than 1%). One way or another it will continue but if it can't make it big during a recession its going to be a wait for the stranglehold of microsoft to lessen; which would be a nice thing if only because a computer hegemony is one reason viruses happen.

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