Microsoft’s Windows Operating System continues to make billions of dollars being sold and prepackaged with new computers. However the inevitable demise of its dominant monopoly, is so apparent that even mainstream media is writing about it (via Silicon Alley Insider).
Joe Nocera write the following for the New York Times
Windows is already dying a death by a thousand cuts. Yes, Microsoft still makes billions by selling pre-installed Windows via computer manufacturers. But ever-so-gradually, the Internet is upending its business model just as surely as it has upended models for the music, television and newspaper businesses… Bill Gates saw this coming many years ago — and sounded the alarm in a famous memo to Microsoft’s executives. But in the subsequent decade-plus, the company has been unable to keep it from happening.
Think about it: do you really care anymore which operating system you use? I don’t. For years, I owned both a PC and a Mac. I could use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox, more or less interchangeably, to access the Internet. I could write an article on one computer, send it via an email message to the other one, and it worked just fine. Ditto for PowerPoint, spreadsheets, and many of the other applications most people use — including Apple’s iTunes.
Even my teenage sons, who stuck with Windows because most computer games were written for PCs, stopped caring. They could play games over the Internet, and all the most popular games were made for the Mac as well. I’m convinced that iTunes and the iPhone are not the only reasons Mac is gaining market share. The other is that people have come to realize that they do not really need Windows anymore. Any ol’ operating system will do. The browser and the Internet have already rendered them largely irrelevant.
Obviously Microsoft is not going to vanish overnight, “But as the rise of the Internet, Apple (second coming), mobile computing, Google, et al, are demonstrating, PC operating systems are a lot less important than they used to be. And that’s really bad news for the long-term cash flows of the Microsoft Corporation,” Henry Blodget continues for SAI.
I appreciate Blodget’s intelligent approach to calling operating systems “useless.” But the entire computing industry lies within the kernel of each Operating System. Hardware manufacturers would not be in business without operating systems. Even on your mobile device, that’s an operating system. And you SHOULD care about which one you’re using. If you don’t, then you genuinely don’t care about technology enriching your life. You simply care about it completing your utilitarian tasks simply to get by. Like Bill Gates says “software, software, software.” The key difference is where people differentiate software on the internet (web-based-applications), and software on your hard drive. Either way, both forms of computing will require a stable browser, and a stable operating system for that browser to run in.
Blodget continues to say “And as you think about the terminal value of Microsoft Corporation, ask yourself whether, in ten years, PC makers, corporations, and consumers will still care what software runs their device’s plumbing. We know we won’t. Just give us a clean, customizable desktop and the ability to run apps and access the Internet, and we’ll never buy an “operating system” again.”
I agree with Blodget’s intentions on never paying for an operating system again. In fact, they should all be free and come with your hardware. Yes, even Mac OS X. Give it some thought. Why not? It would certainly be within Apple’s interest as far as increasing their market share. Make OS X Free with every Mac! But Blodget’s overall evaluation that operating system’s will mean nothing to the average consumer seem to be a little overzealous. The operating system is at the core of computing, without an operating system, we can’t access a browser to write these blog posts.
