The end of an era?

The future. Don't be too happy with Microsoft's demise. As teachers we have had it easy teaching one operating system, one application suite. No giant is displacing Microsoft, but hundreds of smaller players are tearing off their shares of the market. 

We don't have to take them seriously right now, but our clients will slowly introduce a wide variety of software into offices. So the school of 2010 might be expected to handle : 

1. Microsoft : Windows 7 & Vista, Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access) OpenOffice 
2. Microsoft : live.com
   
3. Apple : OS 10.x For those who put a premium on user productivity, MacOS X is the no brainer option more
4. Linux: ubuntu, openSuse. For those who put a premium on cost savings, Linux is the no brainer option: it runs on cheaper hardware and you get it for free or nearly free and with, or without, paid support. more
5. Google: Chrome OS (Just replace OS when you read browser. Notice the little reference to running in machine code (p15). SE) Software_as_a_service Docs.google.com It runs on the same WEBKIT used for the Iphone and the Mac Safari browser, could it soon be the OS of an entire GOOGLE PC ? more...
6. Yahoo: maybe not

NOT A RUMOR (oct 31 2007) A Walmart - GOOGLE PC. The gPC for $198  source2 

Feed the rumor mill: FREE GOOGLE PC

As long as you're giving away software, why not hand over the whole box?

The argument: Computer hardware prices are plummeting in any case. Experts say Google may one day start giving away PCs, reducing them to the equivalent of the free calculator you get when you open a bank account. The Google PC would come loaded with ad-supported software designed to keep people Googling - and not necessarily doing their work.

A recent study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that employees spend 11 seconds a day, on average, glancing at ads surrounding free software. Clicking on ads wastes another 15 seconds a day. These are tiny increments of time, but they add up. Over a year, Nielsen Norman estimates, a free computer could easily cost a company $100 an employee in lost productivity.

Another new frontier for Google is cellphones. Already the company is delivering services such as traffic updates to phone screens. Many analysts expect Google to team up with a cellular service provider such asSprint (Charts) or Cingular to offer a mobile pricing tool.

Cellphones already have cameras, goes the reasoning. So why not add a bar-code scanner? You could walk into an electronics store and scan a DVD player. Up would pop the price, along with Google ads for various area merchants, touting their lower prices on the very same item. "This is a logical direction for Google," says Roger Entner, a telecom analyst in the Boston office of Ovum, a research firm. "It would extend their advertising reach out onto the actual floors of merchants."

Or what if Google offered a certified same-day international digital document-delivery service? That's eminently doable, given Google's massive server farm. America's entrepreneurs would turn cartwheels in their Dockers if Google figured out a way to beat FedEx (Charts) and other couriers on both price and speed.

Or what about an e-mail translation service? Simply send an English e-mail to your Chinese supplier via google.chinese.com. Google would translate the message into Chinese and forward it to the addressee - in real time.

If nothing else, expect Google to continue challenging established ways of doing business. For good and ill, Google is one of the most awesome forces ever to be unleashed on the business world - or rather the Google world in which all business owners now live. More

How Microsoft will compete with 'free' | Outside the Lines - CNET News

Excerpt: My guess is Steve Ballmer is working on a combined answer, one that is sketched before our very eyes already. Microsoft's Live services are but a rehearsal for a much bigger act, Microsoft's Cloud OS, sometimes calledStrata. And, based on Microsoft's own Cloud services, we'll see a Danger-based smartphone, as proprietary as the Xbox and the iPod competitor Zune. Put another way, Microsoft's future business model will borrow from Apple and Google, it will have two components: proprietary devices and "universal" Cloud services. And like its models, it will attempt to extract extra profits by nicely tying both components together. For example: iPods are tied to the iTunes service, Android phones might (we don't know yet) better enjoy Google applications.