Linux may lose its chance of competing with Microsoft after the 64bit revolution gets underway

[ted leslie]

Desktop is about to become a second class citizen, so who cares!

I wake up in the morning, I reach over, hit "pick up mail"
on my nokia 9300i, it connects to my wifi, i get my mail,
its got a full keyboard, pretty nice monitor and ... its my PHONE!!

My girl friends son, he gets up in the morning, reaches over,
checks out his pin mesg., images sent to him by his friends,
he'd check his pop3 account to, but his phone doesn't have that
ability ... yet.

5-6 years from now (as in Japan now), the cell phone will be the
dominant computing device by almost ever metric you could judge it by.

Now i have a nokia 9300i that was 1000$ and i pay 50$ a month for a
pretty sizable amount of data, with first 3 month unlimited.
Now it has a key board that i can just touch type on, and a montior
that is (i think) 800x320 or something like that.

In 6 years, I will have a nokia that has a bit bigger keyboard (so can
easily touch type), and a fold out lcd that will give me crystal clear
24bit colour at probably 800x600 or even bigger. be 800Mhz or more,
and hopefully running linux.

Right now i pull up google maps when i am driving, i read my email on it
(cpu is a bit pokey so not quite as good as desktop), and 
the new opera browser for it allows me to surf the web like i did 7
years ago when i was on 33.6Kb modem. My office uses a voice mail system
that takes the voice mail, .wav's it, and send it to my mail box, the
nokia, it plays the attachment right out of the box. It also has awesome
sound thus making an excellent mp3 player. It can play full length
movies, but only at 320x240.

In 6 years, for free (included in your plan)
you will have a 800MHZ cpu (or greater), 256MB ram (or greater), clam
shell foldout, full keyboard, 800x600 monitor, and it will be essential
free. And like today 80-90 or more of the kids in school will have them,
and they will not be reading there email, doing icq (IM's), reading
attachments, trading music, trading picture on a desktop,
that will be collecting dust, they will be blue toothing between phones,
and EDGE'ing back and forth, and linking it to there PS3/4  XBOX3 ,
Wii2, etc. The phone will also play dvd quality movies right out of the
box. It will be a camera, and the software to slice and dice the
pictures i take, will be included on the camera. It will be a video
camera, and I will be able to edit the movies i take, right on the
phone.
Desktop are dead in 6 years, as far as being "where the technology is",
or "where the buzz is". Granted, the huge amount of hand-me-downs, and
use in poor countries will still mean there will be a lot in use, but
that actually works very well for linux, as we see already today.
They will still be the preferred device for a programmer, a graphics
artist, etc, but 80% of the population will usually be blowing dust off
of it each time they use it, save for if they need it for gaming, and to
the extent that PC-gaming vs. console gaming plays out, i am not sure.
With the typical family in NA having a 720p or 1080p/i big screen tv in
6 years, console gaming, and having the console being a multimedia hub
in the house has a lot going for it.

If MS doesn't get really big, really quick in the cell phone market,
their revenue/profit is in for a world of hurt, at best they will become
strictly a gaming desktop top console, and have some small finger in the
server market.

In 6-7 years, in todays $, a typical PC, keyboard, lcd, cpu, memory, HD
is going to be about 300$ (provided you go basic on the monitor) .....
and Bill is going to charge how much for the OS to go on that box? and
on the free phone? (included in plan), Bill is going to charge how much
for the OS? and the office suite in the phone will likely be OpenOffice
unless Bill is going to drastically cut the price for his bugware.

Starting getting used to your phone being your primary computing device,
if i wasn't a programmer, it would be today for me, for many berry-head
executives it already is, and in 6 years when everybody is a berry-head
or a nokia-clam-shell-head .... desk top PC ? what dat?

-tl


On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 03:02 -0400, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Aug 2006, Kush wrote:
> 
> > This is a sobering scenario.
> 
> Hi Kush.  I didn't find it particularly concerning.  Various "last chance 
> to grab the desktop" dates have been predicted in the last few years by 
> lots of different organisations and people.
> 
> The argument that the change from 32bit to 64bit is a chance to topple the 
> dominant platform isn't a strong one as right now the change is going so 
> seemlessly that few are even noticing it.
> 
> To me the idea of any "last chance" to get the desktop is a bit silly. 
> 40 years ago the "desktop" as we understand it today didn't even exist. 
> The desktop (circa 2006) will probably be found only in history books in 
> 40 years.  Who knows what computer interfaces will be like in even 20 
> years, let alone 40.
> 
> To me the key is to keep working towards acceptance of open source 
> software and open standards.  IMHO a collapse of OSS would have very grave 
> implications for societal freedoms in the future.  We are so dependent on 
> data held within computer systems that to allow control to fall to a 
> select few is very dangerous.
> 
> You see I am far more concerned with how the law interprets freedoms and 
> knowledge and how that relates to OSS than I am to any specific 
> technologies like the GUI circa 2006.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rob
> 

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