Object-X said:
I respectfully disagree. Microsoft is dying. A tremendous paradigm shift is about to take place in the computer world and Apple, IBM, Sony, Sun, and others are pushing it. This shift is going to happen so fast you won't even beleive it. Microsoft can't keep up. They are still doing things the way they did 20 years ago and that model is about to collapse.
<SNIP>
I would like to think this shift will happen as well, but the problem is that Microsoft has a very tight grip on a lot of the business world PC market and that is not about to let up. What I can see happening is home PCs being replaced with more generalized media centers. A TV with a full HD resolution (1920x1200 or whatever it is, I'm not sure that's the exact number) paired with a DVD/blu-ray playing computer that was relatively small, had a huge hard drive, and a very fast internet connection allowing TV show downloads on demand (movies if the connection was 10 or 100 times DSL i guess), could get huge market penetration. Something like this paired with a decent web browser and a wireless keyboard and mouse could even replace many home user's PCs. The device would of course have to be cheapish and have a dead simple UI. (Think: Start menu is way too complicated)
Now, this "SuperMediaCenter", or SMC, is a great idea and I'm sure many people would love the idea, so what's the problem? Connection speeds, hard drive sizes, and the fact that full HD is not quite there yet.
1. To download a 10 gig movie, at even 0.3 megabytes per second would take 30,000 seconds, or about 8 hours. (Yeah It's a gross approximation) This is actually twice the speed many people have and it's not always going to be top speed, so the range for normal cable/DSL users would be probably something like 6-24 hours, depending on local conditions. This is unacceptably slow, as they can go rent a movie in a half hour. If speeds were ramped up to say, 3 megabytes per second, and the download time was roughly an hour, then the movie could basically be watched on the fly as it came in (even with a few minutes of lag time to cache ahead a bit). Now we're talking. This could be nothing short of total video on demand, and with a limitless library people would probably be a damn lot happier about handing over a pile of cash every month because they could watch anything ever made that still exists on a DVD somewhere. Still, these speeds are 20 times faster than most people have now and so the tech is a ways away.
2. A nice starting point for a good SMC would be about 1TB. At that point one could probably store a good few television shows and movies and not have to worry too much about running out of space every day. Yes it does limit you to about 50-100 movies depending on length and quality but if the company you have the service with has a record of all the movies you "own" then you can download them at a whim. (Although you would have to wait a while) This may be a problem for bandwidth costs for providers however and so a subscription model is far more likely to work with this kind of service, a la cable. With that then maybe 400 gigs would be an adequate starting point, but the lower you go the quicker the average user is going to get annoyed at the fact that he/she can only store a few HD movies at a time.
3. People may replace their computers with a TV that has 1200 lines of vertical resolution but are very unlikely to do so with one that has 480 lines. There just isn't enough room to read a web page at that size. Yes HDTVs are out there but it's still going to take a couple of years before the full resolution ones are in tons of houses.
Now, changing how things are done in the business world is probably even more difficult than this. Bureaucrats, managers, and other people who like to play it safe will chose Windows and Office every time because that's what everyone uses and there is minimal risk involved. Most of my comments on this would be from the point of view of someone who learned TeX before he ever saw Word and so he's just never really understood the draw to a WYSIWYG word processor, so I'll refrain from them. The business world will change slowly, but having a standard that everyone uses is very important to them and since it happens to be Windows/Office right now it will take a long time to change. I'm not even sure it'll change for the better though. I could come up with far better programs than exist in Office but the problem is they would be better for ME, not for the average Joe blow who has never written a line of code in his life, or even seen a command line. These programs actually basically already exists in various forms and while they could probably use a bit of work in the UI department, it's not a big deal. Anyway, I don't personally see a way out of the Windows/Office combo.
As far as the gaming world goes there are two tracks of thought. One is the console based approach where everyone has the same hardware which is updated every few years, and the other is where there is much more variation in hardware and things are updated once or twice a year. I personally like the console approach much better because it makes things better for everyone, but for the PC based approach, Microsoft again wins hands down. This could change much faster than the business world would change, but it is strictly hardware and software dependent. If there were titles for a technically superior system made by another company, gamers would buy them. It's pretty much that simple. This however, is unlikely to change any time soon.
Final note: I think this is the longest, most useless, and off topic post I've ever made to a forum. I guess I was inspired by the other posts above.
I use Quicktime every day to create 360° virtual tours for real estate (sig). It's definitely changing my bank account 
