Your favorite OS is doomed!
I remember sometime ago there was this race or perhaps some sort of war between the TV and the computer. People were wondering who would win. Would we be using the TV as a computer or perhaps the computer would be used to watch TV?
I think that with cloud computing being more and more present, we won’t be seeing computers nor TV’s anymore but just a specialized display that is IP enabled. In a way, it would look more than a TV than a computer but with optional peripherals like a keyboard and a mouse (wireless of course).
Call it the next-gen dumb terminal or what you want but I think this is what’s coming up. I look at what I do theses days and I’m amazed at the waste of computing resources. Word processing, web surfing, email and other simple tasks. I don’t need a 64 core CPU with 4G of RAM to support this environment.
A perfect example is the iPhone. What is it that you can’t do on the iPhone? Obviously very CPU intensive things like gaming and we now have specialized platforms to do that (PlayStation and so on). Most of your day to day tasks can be done on an iPhone especially if you use a Bluetooth keyboard. Now look at the iPhone closely and you’ll see that it’s got only 128M of RAM and it’s running on a 620Mhz CPU that is actually DOWNCLOCKED to 412Mhz.
Wow, 412Mhz. Think about it for a second. I don’t even remember when I had a computer that slow. I was the proud owner of a Pentium 500 Mhz back in the days but I don’t recall exactly when. Probably 10 years ago or so. The average 2.4Ghz CPU is 6x more powerful in terms of "hertz". I over-simplify here but that’s a big difference nonetheless.
Forget Windows, MacOS or Linux. What’s coming up is the Cloud OS. No more synchronizing files between your work PC, your laptop and your mom’s computer, no more crashes, no more hanged applications or messing with drivers. It will all be magic to you.
I also predict that since "computers" will be so simple in the future, they will obviously become a commodity and big brand names will start selling their own version. Your mom might be using a Louis Vuitton computer in the future. Who knows? Acer already has Ferrari laptops and LaCie Porsche external hard drive.
So should you sell your Dell stocks? Perhaps not yet but I see companies like Sony or LG having a competitive edge because they are in both markets and they understand those markets very well.
