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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 8/302006 |
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The heavy weight
champion of the PC world looks shaky .... Since the
PC industry emerged in 1975, there have been fights for domination in the areas of computer
languages, operating systems, and office software. Since the
beginning of the industry, Microsoft was the winner of the fight in computer
languages, with their version of Basic and other early languages. There had
some competitors, most of whom have disappeared into obscurity. Then when
IBM introduced its pc in 1982, with Microsoft DOS licensed on
almost every pc, Microsoft instantly became the winner of the fight for
operating systems. Later, when
IBM tried to take back the operating system market place with its OS/2
– Microsoft introduced its early version of Windows, and IBM became an
also-ran. Then
Microsoft focused on business applications software; word processing,
spreadsheets, database and others, and in just a few years of aggressive
marketing took over these applications too and beat their competitors. Some of their competitors at the time
– most noticeably Lotus corporation – whose flagship was a
spreadsheet; Borland corporation –
whose main products was a database – and Word perfect – whose
main product was a word processing program – all tried to come out with
their own suite of office products – aimed against Microsoft Office
– and all failed and fell into the also ran category. So
Microsoft became the undisputed champion of the PC world; having knocked out
all competitors who dare to fight it face to face. And it seemed they would
always dominate the pc world, until a little thing like the WWW happened back
in 1992, and Microsoft seem to miss this event completely for many years. But in
the world of the new internet, or precisely the WWW, new formidable
competitors created their own applications – like Netscape with its web
browser – and then search engine companies like Yahoo and others, and
Microsoft for the first time seemed to wobble like it didn’t see that
left hook coming. And so
today, there’s a new heavy weight contender for the title of software
champion of the world, and it has made some powerful alliances in its
training camp. Some of its allies include Mozilla with its Firefox browser, and most
recently Ebay in a marketing alliance. The name
of this new contender of course is Google, and it fights in a completely
different modern method than the old school Microsoft. Google is
offering business applications online for free; email; instant messaging, calendaring,
website creation, spread sheets, access to a suite of business applications,
accessible from your pc anywhere you are in the world via the internet. Microsoft
wants you to buy all these products from them, and run them from your PC. It’s
like watching a ponderous old heavyweight fighter like Sonny Liston –
be put in the ring with a much different and much faster upcoming contender
like Muhammad Ali - who floats
like a butterfly and stings like a bee. This
fight is still in the early rounds, but Microsoft looks bruised, and its
trainers have to tell it to start using a different fight strategy, to avoid
its first knockout. . For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2006 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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