The coming changes in operating systems and computers

I saw this ad today on drudgereport. Awesome, it makes you want to strap up and go take down some bad guys--and make 65K! I love living in a country where there are so many good options for work. Looking at the guy in this ad, he looks like an athlete. This ad also reminds me of a Beevis and Butthead episode in which the military recruiter plays a video with a voice over that sounds like it came from a monster truck rally and the scenes show soldiers driving tanks and blowing stuff up. The guy asks Beevis and Butthead if they are in....as if he had to ask.

On another topic, I'm pretty amazed at what is unfolding in the software market related to operating systems. You wouldn't think that anything could take down Microsoft, but they seem to have fumbled away their cash cows, or are in the midst of doing so. Think about it, what stinks about computers? Key issues include the following: they take more than 5 seconds to boot (unacceptable), they progressively download patches and over time become so slow they are unusable (unacceptable), and they store data locally and your hard drive--which is the most likely component on any computer to fail when something does eventually fail. Despite these obvious areas for improvement, the big guns out there have overlooked these issues for years.

Now I see two interesting things happening. I see Google making an operating system that boots in seconds. Doesn't that make sense? I mean, my computer is practically just a television set anyway. I basically type up Word documents and browse on the internet for text-data and sometimes watch something streaming like Netflix or Youtube. Why shouldn't a device that handles those tasks 99% of the time boot fast? Second, I'm surprised at how good the Chrome browser is becoming. I tested out some game on it called Ultima, and it performed better than many of the best PC games over the last 10 years, suggesting that browser-based programming could be ready to do a lot of what we expect out of our PC-based applications. I also played a free version of angry birds, suggesting that this browser could be used instead of Apple app store products in the near future. The latest version of Google Docs has a word processor that now looks and feels like Word. Awesome. Here is my last thought. The other day I was at someone's house and their kids were relaxing on the couch, watching a netflix movie on their ipad. The next day I thought: what if that were a chrome-pad? Can you imagine that, a 5 second boot device that handles all of your computing tasks and saves your info on the web, and which is very handy to carry around? Wow. With the likelihood of chrome apps becoming like the Apple app store, man, the future is exciting. Meanwhile, my Windows-based computers boot about a half-second slower and run a little slower every day I use them.