I'm pretty sure Windows 8 arose as an issue for my clients because Vista's bad press had scared them into staying on XP far too long. By the time Microsoft's 2014 sunset on XP support was looming even Windows 7 was getting harder to come by. With time some of Windows 8's rougher edges have been knocked off (even the Lucky Charms are supposed to go away in Windows 9) but their first attempts to roll out Windows 8 caused an uproar.

So in three years a lot has happened. Government discounts on Macs, the rise of Chrome/Chromium OS and Android as cheap low-admin client platforms, and cloud computing all presented opportunities. And while they move in that direction legacy Windows applications can still be run off small Citrix farms via RDP client software.

Of course all this proves is that alternatives to Windows have become more viable than in the past. Conventional Linux on the desktop is still only a minor contender though for servers it remains popular.


I was most surprised by "Chrome Apps" that can run locally or use remote services and data. This moved Chrome OS devices out of the "browser in a can" class. Today these machines even run native Android applications.

Basically nobody is writing new web applications except for public-facing sites, and even there Android and iOS apps are taking up the slack. Everything has gone back to standalone desktop apps and rich-client apps which avoid the "data island" problems presented by the need for browsers to wall everything in and the huge exploit target any web application presents to scrapers. It's like a SQL Injection risk magnified many times.


The world is changing, but then it always has.