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Bob Cringely's Predictions For 2005

Posted by timothy on from the this-year-will-be-shorter-than-last-year dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Bob Cringley publishes his predictions for developments in the world of IT every year. His latest column contains his predictions for 2005 and a brief look back at his predictions for 2004."

1 of 440 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Duh... by Yaztromo · · Score: 5, Informative
    Bring the PC to nearly everyone's home.

    This was bound to happen anyway, and was more a factor of hardware getting faster, more capable, and cheaper.

    Microsoft's software hasn't got any cheaper, while PC's have. It's been the driving down of the TCO which has brought PC's into the average home. Microsoft was around back when I bought my first XT clone (with no modem, networking, or even a hard drive, and only CGA graphics) for about $2500 (CDN) -- and this was at a time when Compaq was releasing their first 80386-based machine. Now you can get machines that absolutely nuke this machine out of the water for $500 or less. They do more and cost less. No amount of software wizardry would have brought the PC to everyone's home if the hardware hadn't advanced as well as it has, and if not for for Internet and audio and video improvements.

    Give them a platform that is virtually universal in the industry.

    There is no definnable benefit to this. Besides which, it's quite likely that without Microsoft Windows, the PC would have mostly consolodated around OS/2 a long, long time ago.

    Make computing easy

    When? Sorry, but that title goes to Apple, which made computing easy 11 years before Microsoft even started to get close.

    Make computing cheap via making it everywhere and driving down the cost of hardware.

    They did no such thing. Business demand for faster spreadsheet processing was the initial impetus. Hardware costs were being driven down for decades before Microsoft ever came along. Just look at the simple calculator, and what one would have cost you in the late 60's versus now.

    Managing to get on the internet truck late and yet still be the driving force that brought it to home users via making it so easy to get on and use.

    No, IBM's OS/2 WARP v3 beat them to that title a year before Windows 95 was released. It had a built-in web browser, e-mail client, news reader, gopher client, decent telnet client (something the base Windows distros still don't have...) and other useful Internet tools. When Windows 95 was released in August of 1995, it didn't even have a decent web browser.

    Sorry, but Microsoft didn't so any of the things you've claimed, and all of them would have happened without Microsoft. It's called "progress", and it would have driven on ahead with or without Microsoft. If anything, Microsoft has stifled tech growth through their monopolistic practices. Operating systems like Mac OS X show us where we all could be if there wasn't a single dominant software company running the show.

    Yaz.