Day: July 18, 2013

Linux or Windows is apparently not the question anymore… check this out!

In Case You Don’t Appreciate How Fast The ‘Windows Monopoly’ Is Getting Destroyed…

Henry Blodget in Business Insider: “In the late 1990s, a single technology company became so unfathomably rich and powerful — and so hellbent on dominating not just its own industry but a massive and rapidly growing new one — that the U.S. government dragged the company into court and threatened to break it up over anti-trust violations.

The case was settled, and the company, Microsoft, agreed to play nicer.

But it turned out that the world had nothing to worry about. As often happens in the technology industry, what has really destroyed Microsoft’s choke hold on the global personal computing market over the past 15 years hasn’t been a legal threat but a market shift.

Just when it looked like Microsoft’s vision of the PC as the center of the tech world would lead to the creation of the world’s first trillion-dollar company, the Internet came along.

And it washed over the PC industry like a tidal wave swallowing a pond.

In terms of market value, Microsoft’s loss of power has long been visible: The stock is still trading at about half the level it hit at the peak of the tech boom 13 years ago. The effects on the actual PC industry fundamentals have taken longer to develop, but they are also now crystal clear.

Microsoft’s ‘Windows monopoly’ hasn’t been so much destroyed as rendered irrelevant. Thanks to the explosion of Internet-based cloud computing and smartphones, tablets, and other mobile gadgets, the once all-powerful platform of the desktop operating system has now been reduced to little more than a device driver. As long as your gadget can connect to the Internet and run some apps, it doesn’t matter what operating system you use.

Three charts really bring home the challenges that Microsoft and other PC-powered giants like Intel, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard face in adapting to this new Internet-driven world.

First, look at global device shipments. For the two decades through 2005, the personal computer was the only game in town, selling about 200 million units a year. But then smartphones and tablets came along. And now they dwarf the PC market.

This shift in personal computing device adoption, meanwhile, has radically diminished the power of the Windows operating system platform. As recently as three years ago, Microsoft’s Windows was still totally dominant — the platform ran 70% of personal computing devices.

Now, thanks to the rise of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, Windows’ global share has been cut in half, to about 30%. More remarkably, Android is now a bigger platform than Windows.

…the PC business is no longer just getting dwarfed by the explosion of smartphone and tablet sales … it has now actually begun to shrink.

Now that people have a choice of devices, it turns out that a full-blown personal computer is often not the most cost-effective, convenient, or simplest way to do what a user wants to do. Instead of being the center of the personal computing world, in other words, the PC is becoming a specialized office-productivity device.”

Talk about the ultimate perk, “Work here and live longer?” Can Google really pull it off?

Google exec hints at ultimate recruitment perk for top engineers: Life extension

“Competition for software engineers is incredibly intense and Silicon Valley firms are pulling out all the stops to recruit and retain top talent. A great software engineer is a very scalable asset.

Every company can offer perks of free food and high salaries but where can an employer get ahead of the pack and offer something no one else can, what is the ultimate perk? How about life extension.

That’s where Google is headed.

Earlier this week, at a Commonwealth Club Inforum event on the topic of HR and what Silicon Valley companies such as Twitter, and Cisco Systems are doing to attract the best people, panel member Todd Carlisle, Director of Staffing at Google, had the last word, by teasing a possible future scenario.

He asked, what if a perk of working at a company was that it extended your life? He said that people would likely never leave, they would be incredibly loyal.

If you connect the dots that’s exactly where Google is headed.

Late last year it hired Ray Kurzweil (above) a vocal proponent of an idea called the Singularity, which predicts life extension technologies will eventually extend people’s lives indefinitely. This will start happening in earnest within this decade.

Here’s Google’s recruitment slogan from the future: ‘Come work at Google and live longer. It’s a Singular Experience!’

How can other companies compete?!

Google can make sure its engineers have a seat on the Singularity bus. It already has the driver of the idea in Mr Kurzweil, and the Singularity will require the world’s largest, most powerful computer system, which is exactly what Google is building.

It’s an incredibly compelling scenario and software engineers would probably accept lower salaries for the chance to be among the first to benefit from the Singularity. It’s also a message that doesn’t need to be directly stated, but can be implied, as Todd Carlisle clearly did earlier this week.

What could competitors come up with? There is no amount of salary, free food and beer, that could rival Google’s leadership in lifespan extension technologies.

Rivals may have to resort to this recruiting slogan: ‘Come work here — the work is so dull that it’ll seem as if you are living longer!’

[It’s cribbed from Joseph Heller’s novel ‘Catch-22’ where one of the World War II bomber pilots seeks out the most boring things to do in his free time, so that it will feel as if he is living a long life, rather than the reality of the shockingly short life expectancy of bomber crews — just six weeks.]”

Well… it was for me! Somehow, some way, my master password got hacked for my hosting service. And, no, it wasn’t a simple, easy password. The upshot? They deleted EVERY web site I host! And, my hosting provider had stopped doing backups (I spoke with them at length on that point, believe me!) So, I have been scrambling to restore all my web sites this week, and it has made it hard to stay current on blogging. Sigh. A long, tiring week. So, if you see images missing… that’s why. I will be fixing that as I can.