By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
With Microsoft promising to abide by new interoperability standards for PCs, while losing ground in mobile, should it remain the focus of our interests in 2010?(opinion)
We exit 2009 with what appears to be the first sign of a plate-tectonic shift in both consumer and business technology -- specifically, a shift in interest and focus. It's a broader world out there, full of new and old companies with different names and real technology agendas that suddenly seem very realistic. Could we really be emerging into that competitive playing field that so many technologists had been seeking for so long?
It's not that we're emerging into a world without Microsoft (some of us technology journalists wouldn't be able to continue breathing). But even Microsoft's successes in 2009, Windows 7 being the biggest among them, have helped take the focus away from Vista as a roadblock to evolution. And Microsoft's biggest failure in 2009 -- the lack of a new Windows Mobile -- has helped turn consumers' attention toward Google as the biggest perceived threat to Apple's iPhone in the mobile space.
And now Europeans are being asked whether they'd like to switch their browsers to something besides Internet Explorer. It is a very different world, all of a sudden. So our poll question today essentially asks this: For 2010, would we as journalists be doing you more of a favor if we continued focusing on Microsoft as the source of the biggest change in this industry, or broadened our perspective to include technologies you may possibly not care about, from companies or even individuals you'd personally choose to leave alone? Because let's face it, not everything in this industry has the guaranteed interest factor of Microsoft.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
