My Thoughts !

Recently Forbes listed the billionaires in the world and as usual Bill Gates tops the list. He is in that position by giving us, such insecure, unstable and resource hungry softwares! I'm not so happy about it - and so are the other tech companies. Say in another 5-10 years what might bring down Bill Gates in that list? A combination of several things:

(*) Use Firefox. After long long years, M$ decided to revamp IE just because of Firefox reduced the above 95% in the browser share of IE. Firefox is clearly a browser which will beat IE. Now with Google's official support to Firefox, Firefox 2 will have above 50% of the market share.

(*) M$ biggest cash cow is Windows. With all your fav applications, games and drivers for your digital devices revolve around Windows, Linux/Mac is not going kill Windows. The only killer will be its own huge base of installation of existing versions. From Win 3.1 to Windows 95, it was a great leap in the OS in terms of funtionality and user interface. After that nothing much has occured. M$ claimed Vista is the next big thing happening to Windows. Many promises made during the initial days of Vista are now abandoned including the revolutionary file system and the faster desktop search. May be its not worth for the change in UI. So people stop ugrading from their current version.

(*) M$ next biggest cash cow is Office suite of products. When Sun purchased Open office, many thought its going to kill M$ Office. But it had pathetic performance and made it unusable. 3 days back Google acquired Writely. That a web based Office suite. That is good news for all except the folks working for M$ Office.

(*) More companies provide support for Linux based servers. This will reduce Windows's in the server market.

(*) All web based apps. Starting from Gmail, Google had come a long way to writely. Once it has made all the regularly day-to-day software in the web, we don't need a PC with 2 GB Ram & 4 GHz processor. People can get a Linux based low end hardware for Rs 5k and use all the applications from the web. No M$!

Interesting tail pieces:

(*) Next to US, India has highest number of billionaires !
(*) Before Google acquired Writely, I believed that Thinkfree.com's Open office is the M$ Office killer. Try it, its cool anyway !
(*) Ben Doogler has written a brief history about Firefox. Read it here
(*) Its not that M$ sells only softwares. It also sells hardwares like keyboards, mice and x-box!
(*) When Windows 95 was released people waited in long queue from midnight, to get the software. Its the first and last in the history!