There was a time when I couldn’t use a windows PC for more than a few minutes.
I kept getting frustrated by its lack of usability, its old and awkward interface.
It irritated me to the point of spending hours, days, setting up Linux on my computers, in times where it wasn’t rocket science, but not that trivial either.
I even bought a Macintosh, hoping to finally have a system that doesn’t take weeks and endless google queries to be fine tuned, but was modern and usable at the same time.
Mac OSX (and now Linux on the netbook) has been my main OS for 3 years now and I think it will still be for a while.
But.
But this week I’m on vacation, and I’m staying at my parent’s place while they are abroad. I left my Mac in Milano and I don’t want to spend the days looking at a 9 inch display. So I’m using the family computer, an old AMD running Windows XP.
I feared that I would find this days terrible, but… I simply installed Google Chrome (but I could have used Firefox if it wasn’t so damn slow in comparison) and kept wasting time online like I usually do.
Not once, (minus a driver problem that was well known and I fixed) I cursed Windows, even if we’re talking about XP, an eight years old OS.
I simply don’t see it. It’s right here, under Chrome, but I don’t care if it’s Windows, or Linux or Mac OSX.
The tools I use to communicate, do my stuff (had to do menial things on a couple of spreadsheet), check my grades, etc…are all in the cloud.
Even most of my data.
In this situation, we see Netscape’s idea become real…the commoditization of the OS.
And what if Microsoft didn’t annihilate Netscape? Would we have seen this scenario 5 years in advance?
Has widespread broadband played a role in our moving toward the cloud?
Who would have been the “google”, the market leader, in that scenario? Google itself? Yahoo? Netscape?
The only thing more interesting than this whatifs is the future laying ahead. We’re not there yet, but the direction is clear.
Stay tuned, more to come.