Will Web 2.0 ultimately kill Windows?
In Part 2 of "My Dinner with Allchin" (OK, so it was just a cup of tea), Microsoft Platforms and Services Co-president Jim Allchin touched on a few subjects about which he doesn't often opine. — Allchin shared his thoughts on Windows Live (which …
Context & Ripple Effects
Jim Allchin is an unusual person to be floating this question. The Windows chief confirmed his retirement plans in a January 2006 Q&A and has spent the year making the case that customers should upgrade to Vista for its security improvements — so his willingness to entertain the idea that web technologies could ultimately displace the franchise he built is telling, whatever his actual conclusion.
The question also lands on ground Microsoft already occupies: the company launched its Windows Live services push into the Web 2.0 world a year earlier, while analysts were still cataloguing the open issues facing Web 2.0 going into 2006. With Windows still dominant in business computing over Macintosh, per late-2005 reporting, Allchin's musing reads less like alarm than a hedge from someone leaving the platform just as the browser-platform threat matures.
First-order effects
- Allchin's remarks put Microsoft officially on record entertaining displacement of Windows at the exact moment it needs developers and IT buyers committed to the imminent Vista upgrade — a tension between the security-upgrade pitch and the services pivot.
- Windows Live gets a rhetorical boost: the co-president of Platforms and Services framing web delivery as a serious question legitimizes Microsoft's investment beyond the desktop license.
Second-order effects
- Developers choosing where to build face a sharper version of the dilemma: if even Windows' steward treats browser-based software as a plausible endpoint, the case for betting on desktop-only APIs weakens against emerging web application platforms.
- Rivals building web-delivered applications gain an argument for enterprise sales — Microsoft's own leadership conceding the question undermines the 'desktop is permanent' assumption that has kept business buyers on Windows.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the operating system's role shifts from platform to plumbing: value migrates toward whoever hosts and routes web applications, pressuring Microsoft's per-license revenue model toward a services model — precisely the bet Windows Live represents.
- A post-Allchin Windows leadership inherits a strategic fork rather than a settled roadmap, with the answer to 'does the web kill Windows?' determining whether future releases are judged as products or as appendages to services.
The trend: Application logic is migrating from the desktop OS to the browser, forcing incumbent platform owners to cannibalize license revenue with hosted services before someone else does.