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Windows Vista: Where's the Buzz? John C. Dvorak at PC Magazine:

As readers know, Microsoft has announced the name of its new operating system, which was followed by a collective yawn from the computing community. Vista? As in "Hasta la Vista, baby?" That name might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business....

Did you think "Vista" sounds like a credit card company? Dvorak and I did. He reads distance into the choice, and expects that Microsoft will concentrate on its licensed business software and XBox game system.

One odd possibility would be a Google Linux that is Mac OS X- (or Windows-) compatible with a more Googly interface.

If this is Googledygook to you, the prevailing vision is that in a few years most of our programs will run on the Web. We'll no longer own our own copies; we'll use theirs. Just our own files and personal apps would need live on our PCs.

Think about how eBay works: You browse there and use its programs, and integrated ones such as PayPal. Until a couple of weeks ago, I wrote my blog in Dreamweaver, a commercial web editing program, on my PC at the Journal. I am typing this into a form on a web page, the interface of Movable Type blogging software, I'm at home in my browser.

(For a quick overview of the concept, take a look at Jason Kottke's readable Some "Web as platform" noodling).

Microsoft designed its software to perform tasks on standalone desktop computers: Cubical culture. No wonder the next big thing was connecting minds on the Web.

Since that's a lot of what Google does, Google could indeed end up with all the marbles.

If the collective shrug in response to the announcment of Vista is a clue, the view probably includes a vanishing point on its horizon.

Related: Blogger Posts "I May Have Invented Control-Alt-Delete..." Video Clip. At Mac Observer.

It may have happened a few years ago during a 20th anniversary gathering to celebrate the creation of the original IBM PC, but the video clip of programmer David Bradley saying "I may have invented Control-Alt-Delete, but Bill Gates made it famous" (in front of Gates) is now online via the MilkandCookies blog....

Simultaneously typing the Ctrl, Alt and Delete keys is the way to reboot a PC when it crashes. Most PC users know the two-handed maneuver by heart.

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