Gazing into the crystal ball

Today's announcement that Microsoft has made a "hostile" bid for Yahoo makes my crystal ball shimmer. Watching the rise of super cheap PCs and laptops from the likes of Asus means that we might be seeing Linux derivatives at last get some traction. Vista, which had a gestation hat would make an elephant wince has proved desperately unappealing to the corporates. Likewise the newest version of the bloated and ugly Office suite. The EU and the British educational system have begun to despise MS and its manipulation of so called "open standards" and have finally started to voice their doubts. Their is a tide running against the proprietary and toward the open.

Open is suddenly cool in a way that it always should have been. It has taken a long time and the open movements have finally achieved some kind of critical mass. Those of us who were preaching the open road 6 years ago at its inception can finally breathe out. Intel tried and failed to derail the OLPC project. Microsoft tried and succeeded in perverting web standards with its ugly and subversive browser. But the pendulum is swinging back - Firefox has taken over the fight that Netscape lost to the 800lb gorilla. And it is winning. Google's offerings for word processing, email and the like have begun to convince simple users that there is another way. And it is cheaper. It also has better future proofing because of its openness. Embracing standards rather than subverting them suddenly seems to make sense and the long history of fear uncertainty and doubt that Microsoft has used to deter "switchers" is possibly starting to backfire.

Vote with your wallet and your choicesw - let's bury the gorilla and the gorilla pupeteers. Forward with the open road.

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