I've been building my own computers since college - or high school in American terms for you Yanks that keep wandering over here on my blog - ever since I discovered it was way easier than I thought and way cheaper then buying a whole unit. Computers had a mystique around them that building my own was the first step into breaking it.
Now the operating system you'd have ten plus years ago was a bit of a given. Yes, Linux and Apple existed, but neither were anywhere close to Microsoft's dominance with Windows. Linux remained in the hands of the few that truly got and understood computers, and I felt at the time it was seriously beyond my capabilities. Nowadays I find Linux a lot less intimidating, but that's because if a Linux device starts going wrong I have plenty of web-enabled device to search for a fix. Back then, the computer with Linux on would be the only device you owned that could traverse the internet so if shit happened... well, let's just say it involved a lot of travelling back and forth to your friend's house, or to be specific, your friend's internet connection. Mac's were there, but I only ever saw them used by media professionals, not everyday usage.
(For the record, I acknowledge the existence of iOS and Android but I won't be focusing on them on this article as they're newcomers, and not had a great impact on the desktop market.)
There was also another reason for Window's dominance; video games.
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| Oh yeah, look at me cater to the Ultima crowd like I have a clue what's going on. |
If you wanted your video games on a PC, and I did, then Windows was pretty much the only way to go. Mac's had Warcraft... and that it. Linux had even less than that for the triple-A titles. Windows was the only way forward if you wanted to play, and I've used Windows almost exclusively on home rigs because of this. Between cornering the home video game enthusiast market and the gigantic business market, Windows was, and still is, top dog in the operating system producers.
But Microsoft's hold on that title had not exactly been absolute. They are perfectly able to fuck up along the way. The seemed quite happy to fuck up every other iteration of Windows, from ME, Vista and now 8. And 8 is a whopping fuck up. A real whopping fuck up. Most laptops don't come with touchscreens, let along desktops, which screws over Windows 8 something awful. Every person who I've ever asked about Windows 8 has come back quite clear - don't go near it, it's dog-shit awful, stick with 7. I despised it as I was forced to resort to Google search to help me find basic things like the Control Panel and the fucking option to turn off the fucking laptop. So it's fairly said it's not the most intuitive of OS's...
I get some of the ideas presented. I mean, looking at it for half a second, a unified interface across all platforms seems like a good idea. Of course, the next half a second of thought would of brought up that phones, desktops, tablet and games console not only do vastly different things but have require vastly different input from the user, which just goes to show why you should plan things for a whole damn second. Phones and tablets are primarily used for media consumption and entertainment, with input that's designed around small screens and inaccurate thumbs, where desktops straddle a myriad of tasks from work related spreadsheets, programming, rendering, data crunching and media consumption, with highly accurate and precise mouse manipulation input. There's a slight fucking difference there. Could you imagine trying to use an accounting spreadsheet on your iPhone, or trying to render an 3D animated object on a Galaxy's tiny CPU?
It doesn't help that I don't feel like Microsoft recognize their error, and would rather force it down everyone's throats with the attitude of, hey, we're the top dog. What else you got? All rumours point to more of the bad, more apps, more walled gardens, more 'no Start Menu' crap. And me, who wants my games, would sigh. Triple-A titles don't come to Macs often, even if I could afford their lubricious price tag, and Linux is a non-standardized mess, which is also shunned by the gaming development community - regardless of the irony that most games were likely programmed on a Linux computer.
But now SteamOS is here.
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| Sort of like the moon from Majora's Mask slamming into Mircosoft's Hyrule. |
For starters, it's Linux with political muscle behind it. Steam is a massive distributor of games, and if anyone could say to developers 'Here's the OS baseline you're working to - not Ubunto, Red Hat or anything, this,' it's Valve. They're already pushing the porting of video games to Linux before this all went down, and with the Steam Box, they offer home network streaming for any game that isn't compatible. Plus they're already a Triple-A content producer anyway... when they get round to it.
In fact, I highly expect to find many games slowly but surely starting the port to Linux if this takes off. We've just seen Nvidia turn around and start pledging more Linux support from a historically poor stance of Linux support, and I doubt that SteamOS being and Nvidia's turnaround are not somehow related. One of the biggest issues I heard about Linux thus far is the sheer lack of support from companies like Netflix - and considering that SteamOS has already been stated to want to be big on all media, specifically mentioning streaming media, I remain hopeful that a breakthrough in support is around the corner.
As it's Linux based and designed to run on a smaller console, it'll also be mercifully lightweight on your system resources. No more of the whole 'I'm using over 33% of your entire system resources to sit here idling' nonsense, which I've come to resignedly expect from later iterations of Windows.
If they come out and say that they're also going to get some office programs on there as well...
Oh.
Oh boy.
Oh, and it'll be free by the way. Yup. Free.
That's some serious competition to Microsoft right there. While in yesteryear if someone mentioned picking up a new computer you wouldn't ask about what OS they intended to have because it was assumed Windows - in 99% of all cases - today we're looking at a very different market. I hear people express disappointment and dissatisfaction with the latest showing from Microsoft constantly, and I have often heard people with lower experience in computing voice idea of going over to Apple - even with their hefty price, their slimmed down OS experience is becoming quite attractive.
Microsoft's latest offerings have, in a serious understatement, not been good. I trashed Window's 8 enough so we'll pass that mess. We've seen the disaster of the Surface, and now we see the Surface 2, which is exactly the same but with HD. So that will be the next big disaster. And that was after the humiliating climb down and backtracking of the Xbone, which unfortunately for many of their core audience was too little, too late. Whilst Microsoft are unlikely to backtrack again and reintroduce such hated policies, many of their audience has been turned off by the toxicity of the Xbone and become vulnerable to Sony who has been exerting serious effort to woo Microsoft's unhappy possible customers. It's got so bad that Steve Ballmer didn't so much as step down as was pushed.
And here's SteamOS. It'll be free, and it'll be striking at that lucrative gaming market. While it may not have shots to fire at Microsoft's colossal earning ability from the corporate market, it is worth considering that increasing the amount of home users comfortable with using a different OS cannot be good for Microsoft in the long term. If the next generation of employees are happy and able to use a free OS on their work computers, how long will that money hold for Microsoft?
So what's next for Microsoft?
Well, if SteamOS can deliver, I for one won't really care. And coming from a person who's been married to Windows for well over ten years, that's got to be alarming.
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