Windows 7 to be integrated with Microsoft Live!.
What does it mean though?
MS has two problems :
- the desktop OS is almost a commodity. There are few applications that need Windows's specific services (as opposed to equivalents on Mac, Sun, Linux, or Android) It's hard to imagine Windows 7 doing something that other OSs aren't thinking about or couldn't quickly copy. (LINQ for serious applications? Drivers for multitouch Surfaces? Everyone will have something like that. )
- the PC is about to explode into the device swarm.
How does closer integration between Windows and Live! help in that context. It's not a winning move for MS to make their Live! services dependent on Windows 7. Will they exclude XP and Vista users from Live! in 2010? Unlikely.
After that, they can only compete on "seemless experience". But every time Microsoft compete against Apple on anything resembling an "experience", they hardly have the upper hand.
Now, the natural tethered client of an online service is a light-weight virtual machine like Flash, Silverlight or JavaFx. Not a whole operating system - users will want their virtual machines to play well together in a common sandbox, supporting
copying, pasting, dragging and dropping etc.)
There is scope for some individuation and platform warring among standards for these virtual machines. MS may be able to make Silverlight-only services, but they'll certainly have to make Silverlight run on Mac (and at least condone clones running on Linux)
This kind of virtual machine is also a natural for the device swarm : eg. Flash on Chumby, Java VM on mobiles ... Silverlight on XBox?
So while the desktop OS becomes a commodity, this space is going to get hot as the VMs compete for developers' attention. Particularly smaller devices are only likely to come with one of these virtual machines pre-installed. They'll compete on video-handling capability, graphics library, back-end data synchronization, bredth of applicability etc.
In a sense, the Java vision is finally coming into its own ... although whether Java turns out to be the victor is another matter.
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1 comment:
Interesting. While it makes sense in a way (after all, they're only following Google/Yahoo/Mac), it's a shame the argument is generally: "A single ID helps you keep everything together."
This can be good - e.g. in the case of Apple, where my forum discussions are under the same ID as my calls to tech support, and the integration is used to ask me pertinent questions, such as feedback.
But in other places, the only real advantage is that I have one less password to remember - and considering the number of other log-ins I have, that's not a brilliant saving. Yahoo and Google, for instance, force/encourage me to use the same log-in across their services, but I don't really get much benefit from it, because each service is a different "sphere" for me. OK, I can have a Yahoo "portal" page linking my Pulse posts to my Flickr photos, yay. But ultimately, RSS feeds do the same thing, and more.
I think this is probably the road Windows will go down - integrating everything into a Live ID without any real purpose. Which is a shame, because the idea of a single log-in is actually much less powerful than the idea of making it much quicker to shunt data around.
(There are some obvious comparisons to the proposed/buggered ID system here in the UK, which suffers from the same thing. Do we want IDs that are a one-to-one match to a person? Or do we want IDs that simply mark certain resources as associated?)
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