1. “The browser… is increasingly the only operating system that matters…” for “all Mac users.” Say what??? Surely there is no group out there more passionate about its native operating system.

2. The final conclusion is exactly wrong: “If Windows and Office were perfect, would it be enough to keep Microsoft relevant…?” The answer is clearly “Yes.” With few exceptions, both consumers and large enterprises would much rather own their software and run it locally. Services like Google Docs seem compelling only because Office is so big, ugly and overpriced.

Also, a response to the tediously inevitable pro-Vista comments: just because Vista works for YOU, doesn’t mean that all the reported problems are somehow magically irrelevant. Love your Vista as much as you like, you aren’t changing the minds of the huge numbers of people who have good reason to hate it. An OS that “just works” for only SOME of its users is no good at all.

If Internet apps were truly ready for primetime, then el Jobso wouldn’t need to issue an SDK for the iPhone.

thanx, dude! I’ll be 37 next month, by the way!

So, “Thank goodness” we have keen young minds like yours to advise us on how “scarred” Google is of direct competition with MS and Apple.

However, just for the sake of indulgence, might I offer up my prediction regarding the demise of MS? SaaS as a technology and a business is here to stay. Salesforce.com is living proof. When the concept (coined ASP at the time) was first introduced in the late 90s (during the time that Linhares was a super aware teenager) it suffered from serious infrastructure and development hurdles. With the advent of programming languages like AJAX and 7MBps cellular connections, those barriers are being leveled to almost nil. So then it comes back to the non-tech components…the users…and their adoption rates.

Via bundling, getting user eyeballs has traditionally been the shiniest part of the success equation for MS (cue entrance of the DOJ). While the rest of the free market is doing their absolute best viral marketing tango, MS has the entire audience wearing logoed caps and shirts before the first restroom break.

The only competition to date with that kind of Rolodex? Google. With over 75% of the Internet population (counted as users of search) at their doorstep, why not take a page out of the MS playbook and go after the desktop apps market?

So the Holy Grail is market share. That’s it. Get (and keep) them ANY way you can. Such is the obvious mentality behind the MS raid on Yahoo.
And what do users REALLY want? Consistent delivery and creation of “good enough” content in a familiar ubiquitous platform. The iPod mentality. Add in rock solid support and technology roadmaps for the business superset of the market…done deal on market leader strategy. To whit, Google is hosting “gratis” enterprise content management solutions to shore up its already massive content repositories.

Corporate acceptance of desktop LINUX (whatever the build or UI), 3rd party wannabe dev or app platforms like Adobe’s Apollo (AIR), cheap hardware of any kind, is all just background noise in the big reality…a fun rave for geeks like Linhares and others. When they wake up the following morning, it will be the same story from the 70s, 80s and 90s, the bit players were just organ grinders for the market makers to capitalize on when the bugs are worked out and sufficient momentum is achieved. Very, very few ever achieve long term escape velocity.

Damn…that was a rant. So what the heck is my prediction? Nothing brilliant on my part. Hang onto that MS stock (particularly if you bought 3 years ago) for the next 5-7 years. Bureaucracy will be the eventual undoing of MS as the king of the desktop, not disruptive technology. Gartner is at least partially correct that MS will get weighed down supporting all that code and the bottom line will suffer.

Google is another story. Somewhere in another Ivy League grad school or garage, some folks are cooking up an even cooler (i.e. more efficient) way to wring relevant content out of the giant Internet data sponge. It will take a bit of runway for sure, as Google has one helluva headstart…amassing and indexing the links to unreal amounts of content. The problem for Larry and Sergey is the user switch is just too easy to flip (compared to MS). Fickle users just need to point to a different URL. Zero training (the simplicity of the Google interface might be a weakness) or other typical acceptance criteria. Add in the current received wisdom from the geeks that Google is turning to the dark side and welcome the newest 20something billionaires!

Personally, I am breathing a deep sigh of relief from my corporate board room that I may one day work for them….

I doubt if google docs can be a future, I cant even imagine an application like
google docs which is based on javascript can be a future.