What you seem to fail to see is that you're an outlier.
When PG says stuff like "I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows", I think he's more of an outlier than the parent poster.
Gmail can search my mail much faster than my computer can.
There's no technological reason for this to be true. Gmail takes a second or two to answer search queries over my mail; that is plenty of time for a typical desktop machine to process full-text search queries over a few GB of indexed and largely static data.
The reason Microsoft are 'dead' is that they don't get it.
I think most of my objection to the original PG article is the shameless hyperbole it engages in. Microsoft isn't "dead" by any stretch of the imagination -- they are poorly positioned for cloud computing, but the game is certainly not over yet. Claiming that Microsoft is "no longer a factor one has to consider when doing something in technology" is simply wrong -- even if you narrow your focus to consumer-facing web apps, Microsoft still provides the dominant client platform (IE), and a very popular backend infrastructure (SQL + ASP.NET + CLR + ...).
When PG says stuff like "I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows", I think he's more of an outlier than the parent poster.
Different kind of outlier though: when you're an outlier because you spend an inordinate amount of time among people creating new technology, then your anomalous experience makes you better at predicting the future, not worse.
when you're an outlier because you spend an inordinate amount of time among people creating new technology, then your anomalous experience makes you better at predicting the future, not worse.
Sometimes, but not always. If you spent all your time hanging out with people creating new technology in the mid 1980s, you might have been convinced that Lisp machines would soon become the dominant computing platform.
Mid 1980s one would have predicted Unix/C and distributed computing using Internet protocols would soon dominate, and would have been wrong...about the "soon" part.
When PG says stuff like "I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows", I think he's more of an outlier than the parent poster.
Gmail can search my mail much faster than my computer can.
There's no technological reason for this to be true. Gmail takes a second or two to answer search queries over my mail; that is plenty of time for a typical desktop machine to process full-text search queries over a few GB of indexed and largely static data.
The reason Microsoft are 'dead' is that they don't get it.
I think most of my objection to the original PG article is the shameless hyperbole it engages in. Microsoft isn't "dead" by any stretch of the imagination -- they are poorly positioned for cloud computing, but the game is certainly not over yet. Claiming that Microsoft is "no longer a factor one has to consider when doing something in technology" is simply wrong -- even if you narrow your focus to consumer-facing web apps, Microsoft still provides the dominant client platform (IE), and a very popular backend infrastructure (SQL + ASP.NET + CLR + ...).