From MS-DOS to Cloud computing

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You just walked in the door, and you&39;re voraciously hungry heading to the kitchen to make a skewer with which to cover the rumbling of your stomachthat warns you that you haven&39;t consumed any food for too long."

So, you open a (non-alcoholic) beer, take a can of sardines, and imprison its contents inside a piece of the loaf of bread that peeks out from the basket of cookies.

Without being aware that you are looking at an invention of the 19th century - the canned food - which did not become widely popular until last World War II, and that in its beginnings had major manufacturing, cost and security problems.

What does this have to do with an analysis of the current state of the Windows 8 ecosystem?

Windows 8, a risky bet

As Steve Ballmer - CEO of Microsoft - said, there have been three historic moments in the North American software multinational: the adoption of MS -DOS in the first IBM personal computers, the birth of Windows 95, which broke with everything known in Windows 3.x, and the publication of Windows 8 and its Modern UI.

Now that a little more than six months have passed since its launch, in September of last year, it can be said without a doubt that Windows 8 has not only arrived, but has also been accepted by the great public.

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The debate on the possibilities of this two-headed proposal - half classic desktop, half touch interface - has been relegated into oblivion as if never would have existed.And now we focus on mundane things, like whether the home button will return in the next OS update, and if so, how close it will be to the old one."

A daily life that is a forceful symptom of the natural integration of the system in the daily life of the millions of users who have migrated or purchased Windows 8, in any of its four flavors.

One of which, the version of Windows 8 RT, continues to cause doubts both because of the low penetration that tablets are having compared to their competitors (iPad and Android), and because of the future that is opens when Intel lands in the ARM device market (tablets and Smartphone).

Windows 8 too is making us forget Internet Explorer 6 and the very long shadow in which some still live (for better and for worse ).

IE 10 and IE 11, which is just around the corner, places the most used browser currently - depending on the source - at the level of its competitors that, curiosities of destiny, are now adopting protectionist policies.

And all this without forgetting that the real support of the hardware industry and the big distribution brands, has been close to zero That they already have enough with their own, and that many of them -the large distributors- have closed offices or entire chains and have gone to the other side of the Pyrenees.

Windows Phone 8

After the painful ">

Windows Phone 8 is growing very slowly and has not become the Android Killer that some of us expected it to be; which, we must admit, has improved a lot in its latest versions.

But it is also true that with little more than 7%, it has eaten up Blackberry and now points out that it is going to take advantage of the hesitant direction that the iPhone in particular is suffering, and Apple in particular. general, since the death of Steve Jobs.

The union with Nokia has offered a high level of quality, and there are (currently) no WP8 terminals that are not excellent in operation and featuresWhich, on the other hand, has the negative consequence of preventing the ability to have low-cost terminals on offer; at least for now.

As with Windows 8 devices, the biggest problem currently facing the growth of this market is ">vendors always put WP8 as the last option.

Going to recommend, even, terminals with a worse quality/price ratio, simply due to ignorance of the product, or due to a strange anti-microsoft prejudice.

Xbox One

The new Xbox ONE is a long way off, but represents coming full circle to the Windows 8 ecosystem by adding a complete media system to go with it and increases the primary playful vocation of the device: a powerful video game console.

The current Xbox, with its updates, already gives us a fairly complete glimpse of what I'm referring to.

Thus, it is currently possible to offer a collective user experience that is unparalleled in today's industry And where hardware is blurred which is behind the same interface, in favor of my identity, my applications and my information, whether I am using it from wherever I am.

And the best is yet to come with Xbox ONE and its built-in Kinect.

Cloud computing

The future, without a doubt, is in the Cloud.

It is curious how this revolution in the Information Society, of civilization I would say, is emerging from the domestic level. Where users ">

So we have that personal communications, photos and videos are stored in ">that we neither know where, nor do we care to know -, and that we manage them naturally through tools such as gmail, outlook, skydrive, dropbox, linkedin, facebook, WhatsApp or Line (among many others).

The great challenge, which is what is happening, is business migration. Much more complicated, difficult and expensive. And that could produce a dangerous concentration of providers large enough to offer the infrastructures capable of supporting these volumes.

The biggest drawback to cloud computing is the transfer speed of our communications at home. Spain continues to be a country with slow communications, if we compare ourselves with the USA, Korea or other members of the EU, and this is an insurmountable barrier when we want to use the possibilities Cloud.

For example, it is curious that with the latest Smartphones transfer rates similar or higher than many domestic ADSL are obtained, but at a higher cost.

App Stores

The Stores, both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, continue to have their weakness in that they have promoted quantity over quality .

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Thus we have the example, especially bloody, of the applications in the Windows 8 Store. Where the power of the operating system and the hardware on which it runs, does not deserve that all versions of the best-known programs, are limited, restricted or offer less capabilities than their sisters>."

Or even worse, they're just not there.

It is true that in software, if it has not been built with a certain perspective of the future, migrating to ModernUI can mean redoing the entire program.

But users we are a bit tired of so much bland program, without depth, without advanced features, in a very immature state, and found by the thousands in the Windows 8 Store.

Conclusions…for now

The figures are a metric that does not lie about the success of a bet, and in XatakaWindows we have published the excellent financial results of Microsoft in all its divisions.

A volume of profits the size of the sum of the GDP of several small countries, shows that things are being done well, and that the reception by the public has been positive.

But there is still much to be done and dark clouds are looming in the future of this global commitment:

"The need for mature applications in Stores; the future of Windows Phone 8 intrinsically linked to a single provider (Nokia); the impact on Windows 8 RT of the upcoming titanic fight between Intel and ARM chipmakers; the paradigm shift of Cloud Computing; or the evolution of interfaces to touch and beyond fingers."

I now have the feeling that we are witnessing the birth of something comparable to the amoeba of the future ecosystemTo the very first version of the profound change in understanding computing, in the broad sense of daily use, and of a revolution like those words that said ">.

Which, at that time, were as futuristic and utopian as the first preserves made of brass with lead soldering, from the 19th century , and that have resulted - almost 200 years later - in which we can get between our chests and swords this sandwich of sardines, caught God knows where and when.

Cover Photo | World cans