Buu Nguyen's Blog

Paul Graham said Microsoft is dead (in the sense that it is losing its domination in the information technology world) and one of the reasons provided by Paul is the emergence of Ajax. While it is easy to see that the rise of Ajax-based applications is taking more and more away the land of desktop applications and, hence, the dominating position of MS, I believe that if there is any dead at all, it will be a very slow dead. Let me quickly throw out two reasons.

1. Desktop applications will still long be there. There are just many kinds of applications that I don’t see the point of having them implemented on the web, or even if that is possible. Think about games like Final Fantasy, Half Life. With JavaScript? Forget it. WPF/E or Flash? It’s GBs of data over the internet, baby (and these are MS’ and Adobe’s toys, not “open” toys as Ajax)! Okay, there is even image processing application on the web – but it is nowhere close to the desktop Photoshop in term of functionality and performance. And even if it is close, I need to be able to work offline and save my files since the internet does not go with me all day long.

2. MS will still long be there. Not to mention about the huge cast and market share MS is having, the point is that despite being big, innovations are still happening at MS. Think about cool stuffs like .NET generics, Windows Workflow Foundation, Orcas, Office SharePoint Server 2007, C# 3.0, WPF(/E) (the two techs that I think are part of an attempt to reduce the Ajax’ heat, although MS also has ASP.NET AJAX as a fall-back solution in case WPF(/E) cannot be the big next thing), and a whole more interesting stuffs at MS’ labs around the world, like the Singularity operating system or the C-Omega language (whose many concepts are being brought into C# 3.0). Oh, and I almost forgot, they even have XBox .

So, I don’t think desktop applications cannot be killed, and I don’t think MS cannot be killed. But that will take time, a lot of time. Enough from me, read what Don Dodge at MS thinks about Paul Graham’s article.