Where Apple and Microsoft are driving us

But I can show how both Windows 8 and OS X Mountain Lion presage the dramatic change now in accordance with way in personal computing, and why that means the PC as we know it is coming to an end in the then and there few years. What's amazing about Windows 8 and OS X Mountain Lion is that, in spite of some radical implementation differences, their fundamental strategic directions share several similarities.

Apple set this course when it developed iOS as an offshoot of Mac OS X sometime earlier the iPhone's 2007 debut, and at that time-Apple CEO Steve Jobs made the OS X/iOS convergence strategy official 16 months ago. Current CEO Tim Cook reconfirmed this approach last week.

After a lengthy fling with a smartphone strategy aimed at 20-something social networkers that had no relationship to its PC strategy, Microsoft recently adopted the same basic strategy as Apple; Windows 8 will include a tweaked version of the "legacy" Windows 7 and the Windows Phone 7-derived Metro, running both operating environments simultaneously on x86-based systems however Metro only on ARM-based systems. It's an open secret that Windows Phone is being reworked as part of the Windows 8 ecosystem, with analysts expecting the first serious Windows Phone competition to iOS and Android in 2013.

The fact that Microsoft

The fact that Microsoft, the traditional PC powerhouse, and Apple, the reborn-and-rising power in personal computing, are driving to the same destination means it will happen, for both individuals and businesses. As always, individuals will adopt previously businesses do and earlier IT organizations accept that the change is inevitable and furthermore resistance is futile. Nevertheless, that's a timing issue, not a split in where they'll end up.

A note on Google: Its Android and Chome strategies share some of the same notions as Apple's and Microsoft's strategies, however Google's vision assumes ultimately that traditional PC apps go away, to be replaced by cloud-hosted HTML5 apps. That's a huge chasm to leap, which is why Apple and Microsoft instead are building bridges from the present to the future. Like as not when Apple and Microsoft have shepherded many of us over that bridge, some will move fully to Google's world. Until at that time, Google is an alien entity interacting with the Apple and Microsoft fabrics.

The endpoint is beside the pointAt the core

The endpoint is beside the pointAt the core, the strategy takes the view that endpoints aren't the point. Instead, flexible computing fabrics are the goal. Users are the new endpoint, accessing a variety of devices in different circumstances -- at times simultaneously. With the user as the new endpoint, information, services, and applications will traverse a fabric of devices via cloud services just as Apple's iCloud and Microsoft's Windows Live, as then as through third-party clouds just as Google Docs, Box.net, and Dropbox.

Discover a new breed of data protection that meets the needs of small and midsize businesses because it is simple to deploy, safe and cost effective.

Reduce the cost and complexity of wireless networks with cloud-enabled, distributed Wi-Fi and routing. By removing the architectural limitations of traditional WLANs, you can support identity-based access and enable delivery of mission-critical applications and services to any user, on any device, at any time without a single point of failure.