Update: Microsoft is still done
Steve Job and Apple announced iCloud this week and this was revolutionary and exciting for the media because Apple has taken the name “cloud” and put an “i” in front of it! Wow! Thanks again Apple! We worship you!
Why does every Apple announcement remind me of the scene in toy story where the little green aliens say “Ooooohhh…the Claw” ?
Media and fans at a Recent Apple event
“Apple’s cloud is timid: it’s about storage and synching as opposed to a streaming, real-time, extension to your actual machine.” – Article from Wired
But I digress… The point of this post is really that Microsoft continues to spiral down. Granted, they’ve traditionally been flying so high that the downward spiral will take years before it hits the ground and give plenty of time to pull the nose up, but for now that hasn’t happened.
Microsoft recently announced a new version of their OS. Supposedly a “radical” departure from past versions. And to demonstrate just how radical of a departure it really is, they gave it a new and exciting name … Windows 8! (yawn). I’ll just repeat what I’ve said a dozen times already, unless Microsoft can resist the urge to call everything “Windows Something”, it will never turn this ship around. Windows is un-cool! Nobody wants anything Windows related.
And get this, it’s going to have aspects of the interface from iPhone7 layered on top of the traditional Windows OS. So a user-interface layered on top of a user-interface. Sounds desperate. Microsoft grasping at anything as an excuse to launch Windows 8 without actually doing anything new. I predict that sales will show that they should have called it “Vista 2″.
Google’s vision is much more far reaching and long term. Google envisions a day when your device is nothing more than a window into your virtual computer on the cloud. All the power, all the storage, all the applications running “on the net”. That’s what true cloud computing is and I commend them for that. The problem is that to truly realize this dream requires a very high speed (and more importantly, low delay) network. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon.
