I read an article back on Friday that I’ve been waiting to see. I’ve been expecting it for almost three years now, I was just wondering what pundit was going to come up with it first.

ABC News has this story titled “Silicon Insider: R.I.P. Microsoft?”. Some of the selfsame issues I’ve been observing in regards to Microsoft are covered.

Way back when I first started in this business, Microsoft was shipping MS-DOS 5.x and Windows 3.1x. MS had the distinct ability to competitively market an easy-to-use OS for day-to-day applications. Unfortunately, said OS was 16-bit only. Microsoft took it upon themselves to start working toward an integrated combination of a windowing interface with an underlying command interpreter. For those of us who worked with Windows in those days, your configuration time was a comedy of eeking out as much memory below 640k and using an extended memory manager to provide enough memory to run applications (as they started to grow). Heck, game programmers got fed up with the limitations and were writing mini operating systems to launch their games with.

I never warmed up to DOS or Windows all that much. Sure, I had to be able to use, configure, and admnistrate Windows (3.1, 3.11, and NT 3.51) to be competitive in the marketplace, but for my personal use I never sold out to the whole Windows idea. Things were too kludgy…too many extra tools were needed (Qemm, Desqview, etc) to be able to run applications preemptively and simultaneously.

Note: I was a BBS operator at the time, so this was very important to me>

I tried OS/2 2.1 and loved it. I stayed with the OS/2 family for several years. All the while, I had to keep step with Microsoft technologies for work. Somehow, for some reason I felt I was dealing with the “Mega-Blocks” of the computing world. An overhyped toy that you had to do an inordinate amount of tuning to get to work. One that kept my family fed, to be sure, but a toy nonetheless. The OS was never elegant, and a “.0″ revision from Microsoft rarely worked. My biggest breadwinner and my biggest nemesis, one in the same.

I pressed on through Windows versions as one would do in my place, and was introduced to a floppy installation of Slackware Linux. I had an old 286 that I installed on, and it “just worked”. Sure, it brought me back to the dos style command line, but there was simply no editing, tweaking, futzing around. Install, boot up, operate. That was it. Microsoft (even in it’s most recent Darling of the day – Windows 95) required continual tweaking…editing configuration files, changing setups. You would unexpectedly lose the system. You’d lose an entire microkernel one day, and have to reinstall, or restore from a backup.

Oddly, we never questioned that things never worked, we just fixed today’s problems, and moved on. It was odd, looking back on these days, that we never questioned the we had to continually fix a broken OS…that we never questioned rebooting multiple times daily, we just accepted it like so many zombies.

In 1995, I discovered the other UNIXes out there. AIX, SCO, BSD. I immediately decided I needed to be in UNIX as a career, and it was set. I still deal with Windows today, but by choice, not force.

Fast Forward

I say all that to continue to the article. There’s quite a few of these oddities that have remained to this day. Random reboots or instabilities that you can never quite pin down. You get Microsoft on the phone to a first solution of “Did you reboot” (as if anyone that uses Windows doesn’t do that first anymore) They cannot seem to manipulate a codebase into a rock-solid OS, requiring little or no intervention. (I installed Fedora Core 1 here at the house and put a webserver on it nearly a year ago. How do I know? I haven’t touched it since, and it’s been up continually since then without reboot or crash.)

I tend to agree with this author that the individual, niggling concerns are starting to grow larger with time. They seem to have progressed into larger and larger problems over time, all the while being overtaken by various technologies.

I predict (which I don’t do often) that in the next 5 years you’ll see a decline from Microsoft. It may not be large, and it may appear as we don’t think. After all, Microsoft’s dominance was never one of technological superiority (Mac, Atari, and Amiga anyone”), it was one of marketing. Now that the purchasing public has become more sophisticated and discriminating, the Microsoft facade is more readily apparent. The purchasing public is ready for something new…anything that directly addreses those specific annoyances from Windows at a price people can afford will win the day.

Currently, Linux desktop is too caught up in it’s own interface wars to build a single, unified, elegant desktop solution. They come closer each year, but never quite make it. Windows is the problem here, so they’re “odd man out”. Ask yourself the single company that has viewed their products as works of art…that have continued to baby their operating systems like mother hens brooding over a full nest. That’s right, folks…Apple.

Apple is seeing a significant rebound of late, mostly precipitated by the iPod and iTunes. (Who knew?). The meteoric rise of their visibility since then has placed them at a crossroads. They needed to make their products (and consequently OS X) available to the largest number of people possible at the most affordible price point. Enter the mini.

The Mini is the best opportunity Apple has had in quite a few years. The years have brought Steve Jobs many differing experiences and lessons in marketing that he might actually manage to not mess up. Given the smartness of the new design, the quality of the operating systems, and the direction of the company, there is still a chance.

Imagine a world like so:

Desktops by Apple, Linux, and Microsoft
Servers by Linux/UNIX

A heterogenous series of desktops, all interoperable and standards-compliant. Maximum uptime servers with self-healing tecnology, quietly humming along without our wasting untold hours of productivity just trying to keep our machines booted, but instead using all our time to be innovative and productive, creating the next generation of quality software and tools to help move the rechnology along instead of letting it stagnate in the name of money.

“What a wonderful world that would be.”

I, for one, will be buying my first MAC laptop very soon…

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