IDG Contributor Network: Is it time to rethink Windows?
[Disclosure: Many of the firms mentioned are clients of the author.]
It’s easy to forget that Windows was initially a shell for DOS before it went through a massive change in 1995 (after Apple made GUIs the next big thing). Microsoft dominated the market that resulted, of course. But this was a market defined by desktop hardware, where servers sat in the background and the idea of a terminal was mostly verboten. {Before the rise of the PC we had terminals tied largely to IBM mainframes that were far easier to maintain, arguably more secure because they couldn’t run viruses, and far more appliance-like.)
As we move to a cloud-driven present where offerings like Azure define the space, shouldn’t we clean-slate a new client much as we did with DOS, Windows and iOS? Doesn’t it make sense to strive for a result optimized for the cloud world of tomorrow rather than the PC world of yesterday?