“Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function — killing Microsoft,” Bob Cringley writes for I, Cringley.
“The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped,” Cringley writes. “But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.”
Cringley writes, “What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential.”
MacDailyNews Take: When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms… PCs are going to be like trucks… They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people… This transformation is going to make some people uneasy…because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010
“This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we’re talking mobile generations, which means three years, total,” Cringley writes. “With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be too late to the party…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Whether Cringley is right or just writing out of his rear-end as usual, Microsoft, and especially Windows, has retarded progress for far, far, far too long! The Dark Ages of Personal Computing, which we successfully avoided all these years (even if the best we had at one time was Mac OS 8 “Tempo” – it was still significantly better to the end user than Windows 95), is finally coming to an end. In the end, one fact will remain: Most of the world chose wrong. What a colossal waste of time, energy, and money that frustrating clusterfsck was! Good riddance to Windoze! Welcome to the Renaissance (where some of us been waiting for the rest of the world starting as far back as January 1984)!