Forum Posts Feed
Meta trends - what have we learned?
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by 22111
Dec 31, 2013 at 11:27 PM
“The problem for traditional desktop software developers is that the whole nature of the game has shifted. It’s becoming a complex calculation/guess work as to which business model to go for, both in terms of platforms to develop for, and licensing regimes and pricing strategies to go for. My guess is that the successful ones will be those who will be able to develop an eco-system of sorts, with support for multiple platforms (inc. mobile), syncing, web access, and possibility for other developers to write scripts, add-ons etc.”
I am very critical about the current MS slate offering, and they should have kicked out Ballmer 10 years ago… but then, he is out now at least.
I simply cannot imagine that MS slates will remain in their current shape, i.e. either ridiculous weight (too much) and ridiculous battery life (too short), OR not being Windows compliant (= their ridiculous RT series).
Unfortunately, I did not put my money into Apple when their very first iPad was announced/released, because I wrongly thought then that their incompatibility with their Mac OS (iOS or whatever it was then, 3 years ago) would hamper its sales, prospects wanting to wait for a compatible offering, either from Apple or in the Windows world - as you will remember, Windows slates were available but very thick and very heavy.
Now time proved me very wrong, but my original idea cannot be that wrong: If something compatible is available, users will prefer a slate where there will be NO “translation” of data but where they will have their “original” pc programs, and their original data to be processed, just as in ancient times data shuffling from pc to notebook and back (which is complicated enough).
So what Alexander says in the above citation will again be partly overturned in the moment acceptable Windows slates will reach the market - they will not necessarily come (and will preferably not come) from MS, but they will make available regular Windows applications on your slate, and many people will buy slates then, both (like I) as new slate users, and people who will then have had 1 or more slates in other systems - as we know, today, many people use a pc but then an iPad, too.
I think this is so aberrant that most of those users will return to Windows on two platforms, office and slate.
As for cloud services, of course they will become predominant (since 90 p.c. of people don’t bother who has access to their data), and I am aware that this is another core factor in this game since it will weaken the aforementioned effect of the user now being able to use the same data, in the same way, on both his desktop pc and his slate.
Personally, I hope that acceptable slates will come very soon, but I acknowledge that if they do not, it might be too late, most not-heavyweight pc applications (i.e. graphics, video cut, cad, etc.) will have been replaced by cloud applics by that time.
If this is about to happen, you all can be sure no data will ever be safe again, and no applic can be bought, it will be rent, and yearly subscriptions for everything.
I know that the cloud, the web, is very practical for many things, but overall and for most people, it’s a honey pot. Today, you have a choice; if developers are driven to cloud applics (and they will if they see that those are perfectly accepted, both by the data safety aspect and by the financial aspect), many people will mourn over the pc age that will then be lost (with elderly pc users just continuing to use legacy sw up into their old age).
At the end of the day, for developers, web applics are a much better business model than pc applics were, and most users are eager to switch to that business model which in the end is to their disadvantage.
Long-term, the game is over, we know its outcome; it’s just the very next moves that might be of interest to some of us.
Just these days, the ex-Ebay woman that now rules HP had announced she will not have kicked out another 26,000, but another 34,000 staff from this once first-rate company.
In fact, the business model I prefer, and to which HP and MS clinged to, in the past, is already dead today (and MS, with Office 2013, already switches horses).
The web, the biggest honey pot in history, for the masses, and for smarter people, they put some little honey puts into the big honey pot, in order to get them glued, too.
I think I begin to get why no serious developer invests any more buck into pc applics.
The irony here being that those “dumb workstations” from some years ago, to be connected to the corporate server instead of regular pc’s, never took off, but that now, very thin and light slates will more and more be the “dumb but perfectly sufficient end device” for more and more sophisticated web applics, which will bury the pc for good: Even cad will be done on (bigger) iPads, since the respective sw houses will not upgrade their pc versions but by the corresponding web applics.
And in 20 years, they will implant chips in your brain, and in 25 years that will become mandatory.
Posted by 22111
Jan 14, 2014 at 01:32 PM
Dirge, continued
Today, on news sites they tell you that Google buys “Nest” (this would also be German for “nid”, “home”) for 3,2 billion $$. The current owners say that the authorities will only be allowed to put in special add-ons in those net-connected smoke detectors, etc in special cases; Google will certainly adopt a broader policy for non-smoke data to be transferred to the web, too once such data transmission will be possible without making too much noise; spiegel.de thinks that “Google wants to get entry into your bedroom”, when in fact it’s in the office that the really interesting things are discussed today.
From this, I got a link to a 2-months old article, http://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article122156237/Windows-10-laeutet-das-Ende-der-Freiheit-ein.html which refers to xbitlabs.com and which muses about Win 10 (what about 9?), and that comes of interest in light of the above since one more time, reality seems to go farther than imagination (ok, it’s not reality yet but very plausible indeed). The Welt article says that closed systems like iPad, Kindle, etc. are seen as role models today for any development there is to come, and that even in Android, makers try their best to make that open system as closed as they can, in order to get hold of the respective sw market of their respective hardware.
The article says that MS will design Win 10 - attention, we are making the switch from sw to the os here, and that’s the real interest in this post - in a way that the user will need the web to run his sw. In the post above, I spoke about notebooks and slates as “dumb but perfectly sufficient end device[s]” for sw, running from the cloud, but I also had in mind some people would be able to choose to continue to work with their old, non-cloud sw on their notebooks at least, and this MS move to replace even Win with a cloud Win means that they try to hinder exactly this choice of yours; of course, to do the full step instead of doing it halfways-only is very logical from their pov.
So what does that mean in practice? Technically, it will be possible to destroy old Win versions as soon as your device (let’s say an old notebook running with Win 7, the last acceptable version) the second you imprudently connect it to the web (e.g. for just browsing some site for urgent info, whilst regularly, you would use some other device for such a task); technically, it’s also possible that e.g. Win 7 is self-destroying, e.g. by Jan 1st, 2019 or such, and/or in combination with total absence of net connection of that devince = that specific Win installation, e.g. self-destroyal will be withheld for some 2 years on every net connection (allowing MS access to that installation), and of course this can be applied in combination: For the time being, self-destroyal is reported but such connections, whilst any further connection will instead trigger that destroyal.
On the other hand, all those Win versions, at least from XP on, cannot be installed for running on machines (old or new) without the placet of MS, i.e. it will be of no use to buy old machines with old Win versions, in order to have your current sw running, since in any case, MS = “they” will be able to prevent you from using the os you need for that. (This arises the question if there are virtual Win installations on Macs that do not phone home, but then, the Apple os itself will very proably do that, so you’ll be quite in field 1 here.)
So this means that contrary to what I had thought above, you cannot even be sure that you will be able to use your old sw on old machines (and it safely can be predicted that in some transient years, XP/Win7-running laptops will cost 10,000 $$ on ebay and such), but in the end they will simply take away any non-net os from you, and then Win 3.1 computers will become in high demand.
From another pov, we’re currently in the very last years of pc “standardization by os”, i.e. not only the net is to be considered the biggest honey pot in history (since it didn’t drive people to it but by their own will, for years, before becoming mandatory in some time from now now), but the MS Win system has to be considered as a major honey pot in its own right since we all (?) thought we were “safe with it” in the way that there would be “development”, causing some incompatibilities here and there, but we weren’t told that some years later, every foundation of that system would be taken away from us, and that WITHIN that very system, there would be a total paradigm shift, FROM “pc” (which means “personal” in the sense of you being the owner of your data, at your place) to “dumb end device, not even storing your data anymore, let alone the sw, and even the os is now just that part that will make your device run the real os on THEIR servers” - if people had foreseen such a development, many of us, I suppose, would not have touched Win to begin with.
From another pov yet, the move of developers to cloud applications now does make even more sense since in some time, they cannot even count anymore on the presence of some “Win” os on the systems their sw is expected to run on, so they are literally driven to program for the cloud since otherwise it’s foreseeable that their programming efforts’ “product” lifetime will be rather short, so that they cannot recoup their (time and/or money) investment.
And from another pov yet, it becomes even easier to understand why people like TB developers use an “inferior” programming language like Java for their programming today: It’s the user who has to live with the drawbacks of such a choice, but for the developers, that choice opens up much broader current marketing possibilities, without them having to shelf large quantities of expensive code rather soon.
So, in the end, it’s not only users’ willingness to rent net sw whilst this marketing scheme never really rolled with individual users at least in the (now expiring) pc age, but even more important, the underlying os necessary for any sw to run will be taken away from users and from developers, too, in a foreseeable future.
Of course, there are “alternative os”, but first, they will never be adopted by individual users, and second, that piece of sh** we’re speaking of here, Linus, never resolved that core problem how to run Win sw on it, and will probably never be able to do so - from another pov, this opens up a big business alternative to anybody who’d be able to create an alternative op that just mimicks today’s Win, without MS being able to legally stop this, and such allowing for the preservation of any current Win sw when the original os versions will be taken away for good.
But of course, most individual users will then have completely switched to “all-net” (and so there does not even seem to be a very big market for such an os development), notwithstanding the fact that by then, not a second of computer work will be done without “them” knowing down to the slightest detail what you are doing - let alone where you do it.
All this because most people (and this includes many smart people; we’re not speaking of those here that cynically apply their better thinking to serving the “rulers”) ain’t “creational” in their thinking, but just consider what is there, which means they just let flow their thoughts within the confines of what’s presented to them, the irony here being that the net, as a honey pot (for the time being, i.e. it’s not a crime yet do your pc work), deludes people into some ostensible “freedom” that pretends to open up for them.
So as we see here that the cloud’s problem by far exceeds just “where’s your data, and who might become access to it” considerations. Of course, for corporations, there will be arise lots of problems once they also will be taken away Unix and their derivates, expect for the “officially-authorized” ones (Apple and such), and this point in time will come sooner than optimists might imagine today.
And don’t fool yourself: Hybrid sw like Surfulater NexGen will lose their hybrid character the second their developers will judge that now the moment has come to take away from you the pc part of the code - just this moment, they must be quite exasperated to have to do all this “unnecessary, additional” pc part coding, too, in order to not lose their customer base now, when that quite-identical customer base (with some old people having left in the meanwhile, but many young people having joined the lot) will certainly not cause any more trouble, as today the do, in some 5 or 6 years.
And of course, any discussion of e.g. editing details for shifting around pieces of text within the data base of a 2-pane outliner might be considered quite irrelevant, in the above-described larger context of what we do today.
For some of us, the pc wasn’t available yet when we were young (so we remember those index cards in real horror), and the pc will not be available anymore when we’ll be really old (or dead) - and this, very ironically and very precisely included the pc concept first of all, incl. notebooks, “personal” data on a slate/“smart” phone, whatever - they simply take away the “personal” from the “computer”, and from your life (cf. Google soon in every home/office, on the ceiling: in an introductory phase, they will hide their cameras and all, in a subsequent phase it’ll become a crime for you to cover their devices). Everything that can be done, is done. Surreptitiously first (the honey pot), then generalized and worldwide in the open (“1984” considered natural). And yes, next step then will be that they open babies’ brains to inject the “necessary” devices there in the very seconds after birth, and btw, what about intra-uterine interventions?
Well, you couldn’t have seriously assumed that they would stop their control efforts after having realized that their subliminal messaging in the cinema theatre hadn’t shown its hoped-for effects, could you?