Well, in a decade perhaps.
If you’ve ever wondered if it were possible to write fondly about Windows, well, James Gardner (kind of) gives it a go in his recent post on the desktop upgrade about to take place at the DWP:
It feels funny, doesn’t it, thinking about Windows in the context of being irrelevent, after all these years we’ve relied on it. I guess it proves, again, that change is the only constant.
As James puts it earlier in his post:
I think this will likely be the last verion of Windows we ever widely deploy, though.
The reason? I think we’ll have fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that’s coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most of our stuff will arrive via the browser.
So it looks like Scott McNealy and Sun were right all along. The network is the computer.
Do you think the broadband infrastructure will ever be good enough to give a desktop-like experience from cloud based apps ? I don’t see that happening anytime soon. That’s the crucial element in all of this.
Ian