Doom and Gloom for Windows?

Ran across this article today about the future of Microsoft. Gartner (a pretty respected company that analyses and reports on trends in IT) is claiming that Microsoft "faces serious competition that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts". Interesting thing though. Linux doesn't seem to be picking up steam at the desktop level and, for a business, the Mac (although a beautiful work of art) is generally more expensive and incompatible with most client/server business software. So, who is the competition? The article brings up a good point in that there is not any competition in the enterprise space except for themselves (Microsoft). I would say that the SaaS space is where the competition is ultimately going to come from. When everything (or almost everything) becomes browser based, it won't matter what desktop OS you have, it just has to be compatible with the applications you are trying to run from wherever they may be on whatever you may have in your hand at the time (pc, phone, etc..).

Until later - Enjoy!

Google Sites

A few posts ago I chatted about SaaS. Today I came across this article that is talking about Google Sites. Another example of a Software as a Service application. I am curious to see how it works, so I may give it a try. We use Microsoft SharePoint at work and although I was a little reluctant at first, I have really come to like it. It kind of follows the SaaS idea, although it is hosted locally. It has become our internal collaboration tool. We can (very easily) set up a 'web-page' that people can use to store documents, create surveys, create simple project plans, create issue logs, create discussion boards, blog and wet up wiki sites. There is also a feature where you can have your own 'page', similar to Facebook or other social networking sites. The cool part is that you don't need a technologist to walk you through every step. With minimal training, you can create and maintain your own site. It is starting to become more of a standard for how we collaborate internally. The downside is that is that it is hard for us to let outside users have access to information that they may need to help us on specific projects. I am thinking that maybe Google Sites would be a potential solution for this.