Digital Lifestyles

Is The Fate Of The Entire World

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Of computing hinged upon the eternal conflict between the "nerd" (Gates) and the "cool kid" (Jobs)?

The classic high school battle, amplified to global proportions.

Gates gets a bad rap for possessing a woeful lack of creativity, for turning of other peoples ideas into monopolistic VC wet-dreams.

Whereas Jobs gets all the kudos for "insanely great" creative vision. But the Mac world neglects remember that Jobs nicked the idea for a GUI from Xerox. And Apple never invented the MP3 player. They tried to establish their own proprietary media formats; like Quicktime.

Using it every day, Windows XP hasn't BSOD'ed on me since its launch in October 2001. So, "it just works" ain't just an Apple USP these days.

Please discuss.

Google Desktop Search

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Google Desktop Search.

The lid is lifted off yet another Google futureOS component. It works like Google, user familiarity makes a lot of sense - score 1 point. It works better than the poxy standard search capabilities of Windows which, admittedly ain't exactly hard - score another point. It provides a simple but powerful search capability today, not after 2006 when (chargeable upgrade) Windows Longhorn finally shows up and then 2007 when WinFS gets round to it - score 2 points. It's free - score one point. It works - score 1 point.

I could go on. What with Apple totally owning the pocket hard disk player market with reportedly 92% of all sales in that sector, Google offering free and platform indepenent (OK, Picasa, Toolbar are Windows only, and GDS is Windows 2000/XP only - thus far) apps, you can't help but get the impression that MS domination has well and truly topped out now (actually, probably a few months ago), and is now slowly but surely and progressively being eaten away and the notion of what the operating system is dismantled and transposed to a new paradigm.

What next? A browser based document editor integrated into Gmail. A web based database environment?