Happy 2009 Holidays and Prosperous 2010 !

EDITORS NOTE: I used a little-known hack in WordPress 3.1 to actually adjust a time stamp of this post, originally posted December 24, 2009 – to timewarp into December 2008. Enjoy!

Wow, so  much has happened this past year, that I find it virtually impossible to even try and predict next year. But, I guess it’s somewhat of a tradition on this blog, so I will give it a go:

• Since this is the great year when Gaming finally “took off”, I want to start things by reflecting on PlayStation 3 (R.I.P). Most people say that the introduction of Nintendo’s Wii HD is what killed it, but I felt the troubles brew right from the start, with their strange bet on now-dying Blu-ray format, and the problematic design of Cell CPU. Ironically, the competition now finally ripping the big rewards, especially from offering all those Excellent and Free Ad-Supported games this holiday season.
• Speaking of home entertainment – I believe Microsoft should put even more focus there. After taking such a big beating this year with the dramatic decline of Office and Windows market share, they really need to push their new Microsoft Home product, and get more builders signed up to having homes come with Windows preinstalled. Yea “Your Home with Windows!” would have been such a great pun, shame their silly marketing named it “Microsoft Home – Ultimate Edition”, instead of plain “Windows”. Their Entertainment unit is already the most profitable in the company, keeping the whole thing “afloat”, so it’s only natural…
• The Operating System wars are only likely to intensify in 2010. The introduction of Google OS this year, especially with it running so many Windows Apps faster than Windows, changed so much. I predict that in addition to further growing their already dominant market share on the ever so popular Netbooks, Google will finally build and market their custom business Client appliance (aka: PC). iNetBook (seriously Apple, creativity much!?) is a serious contender here, but their insistence on charging premium even over Windows 7 netbooks, is keeping their market-share still around 35%.
• I am still shocked and saddened by the recent demise of nVidia, as are many of you, I am sure. It’s a shame too, I always loved their products. So the big question now remains whether AMD can survive and even thrive, just on their excellent line of embedded chipsets for Netbooks, with those amazing 3D capabilities. Intel’s offering is finally on-par, now that they woke up to the importance of proper 3D and 2D graphic acceleration. I almost wish that AMD rename themselves to ATI, a brand that should make it easier to compete with Intel, in this great Brand war that we got now.
• Who could have predicted that Adobe would buy Sun this year, certainly not I… Or that they would so quickly release this amazing business cloud platform offering, integrating fully complete high-performance backend, with the amazing and visually appealing front-end framework? This only deepened the many troubles at Oracle, and I don’t see them coming back with anything next year either. Makes me wonder if Larry is asleep at the wheel, or just planning to abandon rapidly sinking ship soon? On a personal note, I was saddened at first to hear that Adobe chose to abandon Sun’s Java, in favor of ActionScript 5 standardization on client and server. I am a long time Java fan, but I guess I’ll have to get over it.
• In other personal news – I am still torn about exact specs of my “New Year Gift” for myself. I got my eye on that 14″ Dell beauty, the half a pound thin netbook, with desk-projected keyboard (though I will mostly use on-screen keyboard and speech input). Even though I am a Microsoft shareholder, I can’t seem to justify the “Windows 7” premium for choosing that OS. In fact, I have a suggestion for Microsoft, why not simplify the tough choice consumers are faced when they walk into Best Buy today? Instead of them having to choose between Google OS, Mac, Windows 7 or Ubuntu, just give them “Windows 7+” option (Just don’t call it ULTIMATE!!). Beat Googlers at their own game, and pre-install the Open Source Google OS, alongside Windows 7, tightly integrating the two. That should also make it feasible to justify your price premium!
• Finally, I was as excited as many of you to hear that they are taking pre-orders on Robo-girl this holiday season. Though the thought of never cleaning, washing dishes or doing laundry again is very appealing, I found the price to be a deterrent for me. I think I’ll give it another year to mature, and for the price to come down a bit. Of course, I am afraid to ask what my wife thinks about the idea…

To conclude, I want to remind everyone the gloom and doom atmosphere of a year ago. Back in 2008 when all you heard around the holiday time was Recession, Depression, etc. Oh, how quickly we tend to forget, and how readily we spent a record 15% more year-over-year, this holiday season. Now that economy is booming, I suppose it is only natural for people to “overcompensate” for such a dismal holiday last year…

PS: More Editors Note – Kudos to Matt and the team at Automattic. This new Time-warp feature you guys put together, is really amazing. At first I tried accessing a post from 1988, just for the fun of it, but it was coming in too slow over 2400 kbps modem..

Happy Holidays and Have Fun!

Comments #

Comment by Dave on 2008-12-24 23:40:49 -0500 #

Happy Holidays to you and your family Adi. Enjoy the time off.