Digital Home Thoughts: 'Analyst' Conjures Up a Load of Cow Dung

"About five years ago, when blogging as an analyst, I asserted that computing and informational relevance had started shifting from the Windows desktop to cloud services delivered anytime, anywhere and on anything. The day of Windows' reckoning is come: 2010 will mark dramatic shifts away from Microsoft's monopoly to something else. Change is inevitable, and like IBM in the 1980s, Microsoft can't hold back its destiny during this decade. The Windows era is over."

Seriously, how do analysts like these get paid? I want some of that money too. This article is terribly written in many ways, but I'll point out the real crux of the issue that is not addressed: there are no real statistics to show that both actual content consumption and creation are actually shifting away from desktops and notebooks (which mostly run Windows) in the article whatsoever.

Also, I find the idiocy in proclaiming that cloud computing will kill the Windows OS too much to take. Are we returning to the era of 1970s mainframe computing? Most modern cloud services do offload some computing tasks to the client, and to do so it means the client needs to be running a fairly robust... OS. Which is likely to be Windows anyway, using a browser of some kind. Would a browser-based OS (like Google's Chrome OS) kill Windows? It's hard to say, but I'm confident to say that people still like apps on their computers, and going forward it's likely we'll use a mix of local and cloud computing.

On the photography front, I can't imagine not using a proper computer for organising, editing and sharing my images. Even mainstream casual snappers use their computers for that too, just at a different level. Maybe when the first camera that gets a Flickr uploader built-in may we see a decline in people using computers for digital photography.

To end, I'd like to offer an anecdote from my last job: The owners of the company were so paranoid with IT security that we were forced to use thin clients connected to a server in another country. The result of this was that as the company expanded, the systems got slower and slower. On some days it was just hard to do work, with the server taking micro-second freezes every several minutes. With that, I proclaim that the era of thin-client should be over, given my crappy experience with it!