matthewthornton.info

This will be my last (solely) Microsoft-hating/bashing blog for a while, I promise.  A few years ago, Alan Weisman wrote a book about what would happen if mankind suddenly disappeared.  With my previous blog entry, it got me to start thinking.  Microsoft has really gone off it’s meds.  A number of things have happened recently that I think shows how Microsoft has in many ways been marginalized.  Not ground into the dust, but just not the center of the universe like it used to be.  The Yahoo! acquisition failed.  5 years ago, they would have bought them without a blink.  Now, they spent a month haggling, negotiating, etc. until they ultimately walked away from the table.  Second, a guy I’ve never heard of named Jason Matusow aparently went off his meds when he indicated that South Africans don’t understand OSS and, more shockingly, said that South Africans don’t know how to program well enough to delve too deeply into Linux (Unless, of course, you’re one of the developers of Ubuntuu Linux.)  Finally, and I think is actually most telling, Microsoft’s biggest, coolest invention in the past 5 years or so?  Surface.  You know what it’ll probably cost when it first comes out?  Multiply a macbook pro by about 5, I’m guessing.  You know what has already happened?  DIY sites net-wide have come up with ways of doing it very easily and very cheaply.  Bill Gate’s vision of technology, while grandiose, I don’t really think needs a big corporation like Microsoft necessarily calling the shots.

So what happens if Microsoft goes away?  Not necessarily the way of Enron or Bear Stearns but, say, the way of Atari.  What happens?  Does Apple fill the void?  I hope not.  I think they’re a great company and all but with the problems I’ve had with my Macbook in the past, I’d hate to see them when they don’t give a fig about their customers.  Does everyone go to Linux?  I don’t know–I’d be surprised if it happened, though if you go to a Linux help site/forum, you’ve never met friendlier people on the web.  They’re all very interested in helping with your problem, so maybe it will be a generational thing and we can push through to having an open-source society where software is freely available and the rate of software development increases to the point where we can have developers going back to their garages to just write code for people.  Maybe it’ll be a hybrid of corporate software with the open-source community.  Companies are very good for large-scale systems.  I just don’t think that our personal computing experience needs to be dominated by the large corporations anymore.  Case in point:  I have an Apple macbook and aside from the Operating System, I have not paid for one bit of software on this laptop (Besides games, and you can even get away with just playing open source games–they’re really good).  Everything is either on the web, opensourced, or I’ve written on my own.  Just something I thought I’d bring up as an interesting question about the future of software.  If anyone’s out there, I’d like to know your feedback.