Microsoft is Dead

I'll suggest one other disruptive piece of the puzzle. What's the sound of...

BILLIONS of copies of Mac OS X interconnecting?

- iPhones, iPods/tablets(soon), notebooks, desktops, media nodes, wearables (see shuffle jewelry to come).

And yes, something else will displace the Apple universe.

GUI text editors used to be my hero, ever since the first one I used that supported regular expression find and replace (dreamweaver's crap crap crappy editor, shudder).

For, heck I don't know, maybe two years, GUI text editors were my whole world. UltraEdit (needed it for reading EBCDIC data), JEdit, Eclipse, Komodo, Kate, GEdit, each with their uniquely useful featuresets.

One day I determined that I would run vim and vim only for all of my text-editing needs. Since that day roughly a year and a half ago I've developed some quadzillion immediate-throwaway macros via 'q1q@1', developed a .vimrc that follows me from machine to machine that I couldn't survive without, integrated into various little ruby scripts that I use.

I don't have the passion to do the parody right, but I figure while we're at it I'll push vim where I can. And I've pair coded for around a year on a RoR project where we've done all of the development in TextMate, so it's not like I don't have any TM experience :) ++| ft(m)w

I love working with this thing. I feel truly sorry for people who are limiting themselves to a single-mode text editor.

This article is absolutely ridicolous. First of all, "Web 2.0" and "AJAX" software won't ever replace Desktop Software, period. The first issue is Performance. JavaScript is awfully slow compared to real programming languages, and this won't change because of some language-specific features. An eMail or calendar application is certainly doable with JavaScript (even though they still aren't as good as desktop software because of the latency). Perhaps even word processing and spreadsheets will be possible with an AJAX app, even though the current AJAX "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps are ridiculous compared to MS or OpenOffice. But other things, like image editing, video editing, rendering and 3D games just aren't feasible with AJAX. JavaScript is too slow to compute stuff on the client and the latency is too high to do everything on the server, and also someone would have to pay for the server the work is being done on. It won't happen. But even if it were technically feasible it wouldn't happen. That's because it doesn't offer many advantages over traditional apps. Sure, you can access your data from everywhere, but for everything that matters, that is already the case. For example, IMAP is spreading more and more - why on earth would i use some crappy AJAX eMail client? And there's another very important reason why AJAX won't take over the World: privacy. There are a lot of things that i just don't want to lie around on someone elses server.

Secondly, high-bandwith connections aren't available for everyone. Think of people living in rural areas, and of people who just don't need it. Yes, those people do exist, and they won't spend 20€/Month just to do what they already do with conventional software.

Thirdly, it's just not true that "All the computer people use Macs or Linux now". I study CS, and while most of my fellow students have tried Linux, nearly everyone returned back to Windows. That's because nearly every interesting piece of open source software is available for Windows too, while there is a lot of software that is Windows-only. An OS is just a platform for running software, and the software is what matters.

In the end, you even claim that Microsoft sucks. Well, the truth is, they don't really suck very hard anymore. Yes, Windows 1.0-ME were crap, but the Windows NT/2000/XP series is good enough for most people (I haven't tried Vista yet). I've never worked with Visual Studio, but a lot of people claim it's a superb IDE for C/C++. Then you have MS Office. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for almost everyone, and it doesn't suck any harder than it's primary competition, OpenOffice.org (In fact, OpenOffice.org's Base doesn't even come close to the functionality of Access and there is also no good replacement for Visio - no, Dia and Kivio aren't, and then there is Sharepoint and Exchange and a lot more). Claiming that Microsoft Software generally sucks doesn't help, because it's simply not true, and by expressing stuff like that you only make a fool of yourself.

It appears that the business life cycle has sped up in the last century. If it took Standard Oil 50 years,IBM 30 years and MS 20 to enter the decline phase, what should we expect GOOG's life cycle to be ?

Ironically, the business that views their 'competitors' as harmful and does not embrace and view them in a positive way, will not benefit long term and will create many enemies - besides losing public trust . If Google is true to their 'do no evil' mantra, then they may possibly be the nemesis of big business and enjoy a very long business life cycle.

Microsoft will still be THE MAN on the desktop and enterprise for a long time (I just switched to Mac however. Parallels rocks). And .Net is what will keep them ticking. (Office too, but that's a different post. Have you seen what MindManager has done with Word?) If anyone wants to put the last nail in their coffin, build a better .Net. And do it with Lisp.

.Net shows what we have needed for a long time. A consistent development platform where it doesn't really matter what language you program in. Everything gets compiled down the same way, everyone uses the same API and libraries. But the syntax is locked away and guarded (big surprise coming from a monopolist). You can't easily find it, and you sure as hell can't easily change it. And even if you do, the byte-code doesn't offer any more power than the over-language. All you can do is beg for a change, and maybe a year later you will get a watered down version.

Free us from our syntax chains.

You've gone on at length about how cool Lisp is. How it can be morphed into whatever language is needed at the time. So prove it. Fix .Net by describing the language syntax in Lisp. Give the end programmer the ability to see and adjust their chosen language to behave as needed on a project by project basis. And do it in a way that will actually get used.

Instead of making a 100 year language, make a 100 year platform where the language can shift as the problems and fads do. It won't be easy, but it might just change the world.