Forum Overview :: Rants :: Wired and fads

[quote name="foolio"]Yeah, except now that they're recycling old fads, they claim that the new recycled fad is in fact the fulfillment of the original (by this time completely failed) fad. Example: push technology --> RSS feeds. RSS will change the world this time! Example: Sun's $500 network computing terminals --> web-based applications/GMail-type stuff. The internet is your computer, again! (We promise this time!) Microsoft's in trouble! But Microsoft is in trouble, in a way--for some reason they keep enhancing their older operating systems. They've just announced that Windows XP will basically be able to run anything Longhorn can, and their new development environment will be MUCH easier to migrate away from compared to their current batch of environments (Visual Basic, MFC applications). So in the long term no one will buy Longhorn and everyone will move freely between sanctioned MS environments and open source cloned equivalents. Also, no one wants to upgrade Office versions anymore, ever since Microsoft froze the office file format--there aren't any new features because there can't be. So OS sales go down. And Office sales go down. And development environment loyalty (which incidentally generates more OS sales) goes down. But Microsoft may continue to grow--just probably not with their existing sales base.[/quote]