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April 21, 2005
Is Google poised to bring down Goliath?
This isn't strictly an Open Source topic, but fascinating and relevant nonetheless. MATHIEU BALEZ at the Globe + Mail asks a lot of fascinating questions in this article ultimately arguing that Google could be positioning for some serious hardball with Microsoft.
A few choice ideas, "the network is the computer", Google runs everything on Linux, everyone has broadband now, if booting off the network becomes viable, old-world Operating Systems could become obsolete. Could it be true? Think about it, everything Google brings, all those solutions require only a browser. Imagine a stripped down OS which just ran a browser (read Linux) that you could download and have always up-to-date over the network. And it's free. Who can compete with that?
The idea is so cool, and so radical I can barely fathom it, but read this article because it will change your thinking one way or the other...
Also, on a related note, I just remembered Joel Spolsky's great article last June How Microsoft Lost the API War. It's an interesting discussion of technology directions, and how Microsoft's decision some time back to discard the backward-compatibility-at-any-cost mantra has cost them quite a lot.
Posted by admin at April 21, 2005 06:32 PM