Who should we be more afraid of?
Is Microsoft really to be feared these days?
Well they do still control the desktop and many server environments in the Corporate world. Browser share is there. But what of the overall direction their business is heading?
As we move from generation to generation we adapt to what works for us.
In '99 I was working for a large company and one of my pet projects was playing with Linux. "It would never catch Solaris." "It will never hurt Windows" and on and on. Now I had been working with Solaris since it was introduced in '92 to replace SunOS. It was great but prohibitively expensive for all of the startups that were coming around at the time. Linux was going to be the future.
In late 99 and 2k I was building an ASP and it was the first time I ever deployed Linux in production. And it worked like a charm. To serve DNS for a massive amount of Windows boxes for a Windows network.
There is also this little search engine that was using it. They were growing quickly (and I am still a dumb@$$ for not joining in '99.)
Now look at where we are. That nimble startup is now to be feared much more than the behemoth becuase they get it. They understand what I saw in '99. We are going back to the mainframe, the network is the computer, days of old. It is inevitable.
My mom uses linux now. Why? Because that is all she needs. Unless you are a high-end gamer all you need is a browser. That is it.
Other than simple browsing you can read your mail on Gmail, you have docs, media players, etc. If you are a gamer you also have many games at your disposal. You have your second life, you have "casual games" (have to plug the brother-in-law for his cool game, Burger Shop, www.gobit.com.) Your Salesforce, your netsuite, rearden commerce, and the list goes on and on. The cloud is the computer.
All of this with a minor amount of plugins, etc.
Many people I know who were running Windows are now running Linux. Windows has to make a drastic change or it will die. No windows? No office. No exchange. Lose those and MS is no longer a financially stable company.
Where are we going? My PC in my pocket. No....I am not talking about some useless little device with a crappy screen, etc. I see us having an iPhone like device that becomes our life. Use it as a phone, small browser, email, media player, etc. It can then leverage the storage that is on it to be "docked" into a machine with real horsepower.
This is why I fear Google much more than Microsoft. They move quickly and they get it.