Why Microsoft Should Fear Bandwidth

Mike writes "Microsoft should fear increasing bandwidth to the consumer more than any other single factor as a threat to their monopoly. The average user has no desire to be the sysadmin of their machine(s), and telcos and cable companies would be glad to take this task from them -- for a nominal fee, of course, as application service providers. The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left."

Comments

Oh Yeah?

[Lemental]

Its 2005... I want my flying car too. And my house that runs itself. Bah!

I am a Karma Wh0r3 - Article Text

[un1xl0ser]

Why bandwidth should scare Microsoft
-- Mike @ 9:30 am

More users than ever use broadband connections at home these days. Though it will take time, these connections will do nothing but get faster. With companies figuring out seemingly every day how to cram more information down the same pipes, and new options like fixed wireless and fiber to the door becoming available, connectivity options for the average consumer are ever-expanding, and with them, the speeds available.

This spells the doom of the modern computer, and the modern operating system as we know it - and this is not a bad thing.

Broad statements, I know, but this isn't an article about the flaming doom of Microsoft, for I believe they will have a place in the market for many years to come. However, it does spell the end of bloated, leviathan operating systems like Windows XP in its present form, and unless Microsoft is very nimble, it could spell the end of the Microsoft monopoly.

At present, we find ourselves in a situation unprecedented in all history - the average person, in charge of a machine of such complexity that it can calculate anything he or she would want to know in mere seconds. This is almost an untenable situation; this average person often has no idea how to fix the computer when it breaks, and no idea even how to perform the most basic maintenance on it to prevent such breakage. It's also vulnerable to hackers, phishing schemes, and hosts of other plagues.

With a car, for instance, this exposure to complexity is a necessary state of affairs. With inevitably increasing bandwidth, this is definitely not a necessary state of affairs for computers, and the time of the personal computer as we know it will soon be at an end, I think.

Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee. As bandwidth increases, telcos, cable companies, and others will be in the perfect position to become application service providers for the average home user, and said average home user will gladly accept this, as long as the price isn't too high. I see this as almost inevitable.

With caching, smart usage of bandwidth, latency reduction strategies, etc., most users would hardly notice the difference between an application being provided remotely over a high-bandwidth connection and being provided locally by a spyware- and virus-infested home PC with inadequate memory.

In fact, given the above conditions, and a high-bandwidth connection, the ASP might actually seem faster to many users.

However, with Longhorn, Microsoft is trying to perpetuate the days of local computing, and I feel they are moving in the wrong direction. Like an off-balance fighter, the first time a company starts punching in the other direction, the momentum is likely to shift to the other fighter - in this case, cheaper, better-prepared applications such as Linux, Firefox, and other Open Source applications available for free.

Not that Microsoft couldn't also dominate this new bandwidth-based market of remote applications - they very well could. They have deep pockets and lots of research talent.

But that's not the direction they are moving, and not the direction they want to move. Like the RIAA with online music, they will resist this outcome to the end. They recognize innately that once it's not up to a billion individual users tied to the Windows upgrade path what operating system they use, companies will make the decision as to which is the most secure, most network-centric, stable and bug-free platform for providing applications to their customers - and this platform will probably not be Microsoft-based.

And this gives more nimble players, and more prepared players, like Linux and Firefox plenty of space to step into the breach.

In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn't matter, and there's no lock-in. In such a world, Microsoft loses its monopo