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<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>The reason I see a decreasing use of
desktops (and Windows) is multiple:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>1 - Most pcs are getting smaller. The
fastest growing areas of sales are in laptops and netbooks these days. As
these get smaller and more powerful more and more users find they do not need
anything more, and they are now comparable in price.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>2 - Even faster growing is mobiles.
The highest customer satisfactions ratings I read recently are from those with
(1) iPhones and (2) Android phones.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>Once serious computers become portable then
there are a whole new world of issues to solve to do with screen layout,
mutlitasking or single tasking, input devices, battery life, memory size
etc. Windows and other desktop OS are not really well suited for
that transition, especially Windows as it is for current state of the art
desktops and laptops, not really suited to netbooks and low ppwer devices - it
needs mainly Mains power or heavy batteries for hot processors and large amounts
of memory. However with the iPhone SDK (which must have a lot
of OSX ancestry in it as it runs on a flavour of OSX) and Android (which must
have a good ancestry in linux which it is a version of) - these are environments
to target from the beginning. not sure about Windows mobile, but it
does not seem to get the best press as it is not really from Windows
ancestry, it seems to be a specially tailored and highly limited OS
of its own designed to look like Windows although it is not. iPhone
and Android are at least built on the unix or linux kernels for which there are
very lean and efficient versions out there (eg running in a few MB of
memory) - such as the Carnegie-Mellon version kernel. I read on one
recent linux firmware device that was able to boot into full running in about
0.5 seconds by optimising various things - eg no compressed boot image and
special drivers. I don't see much chance of Windows being able to
achieve that kind of performance although I would like to be proved
wrong.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>3 - reliable internet
connectivity means that many grunty services can be off-loaded to heavy
iron servers which could be Windows or Unix or Sun or IBM or whatever - think of
gmail, Google search, Google maps, iTunes store, You-Tube, Hotmail, Yahoo
and all online services etc. This is the strong point of phones like
the iPhone and Android which do just this, and not through a phone company
interface (read expensive) but direct to the Internet (read
cheap). A phone with a reasonable OS that can do a RDC or VNC
connection to a server has all the advantages of the server while
portable. It is in a sense a return to thin client (but
portable).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>Embarcadero here is a prediction and I
suggest you consider these as a direction:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>(a) an easy to learn language (pascal is
that) with a cross platform VCL that is reasonably able to write applications
(with various framework flavours and considerations) for Windows, OSX,
linux but more importantly into iPhone and Android would absolutely be the
killer app like Turbo pascal was.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>The goal would be to produce
a compiler/language that uses the respective OS to render the standard
controls - windows uses Comctl32.dll, Apple and Linux etc must have their own,
so there needs to be something that drives the OS native graphics libraries and
controls. That is not relying on some added party framework like wine
that may lag behind the state of the art. Much better to tap into
what the latest version of any OS is capable of rendering. If VCLX on
windows is inferior to VCL then either people won't want to use it, or there
would need to be some automated tool to port code to VCLX (renaming component
types etc) as a batch process to produce the other OS flavours.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>As far as I am concerned it would be fine
for Embarcadero to say we will only make VCLX portable within certain
constraints, it may well be less than the current VCL in some areas, but it does
not have to be more than VCL, as those who want easy portability may be happy to
give up third party components and win32 calls and live in well defined
boundaries in order to get code they can compile and run on various
OS's. If some win32 calls could be given some equivalents it would be
neat, but this would be icing on the cake.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>(b) The other way to go would make a really
easy way for a browser to run any Delphi app, so it could be put on a web
site. Now others have pointed out that can be done via browsers that
can call up some RDP client or terminal services client. It is not easy
yet however. I don't know how one could do that, but there must be
something possible. I would certainly be paying close attention to
whatever the Google OS is likely to do, as I would imagine thats the sort of
direction they would be thinking too, some way to web enable any desktop
applications via some RDC or VNC connections into a browser or
particularly the Chrome browser.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>(c) make Delphi grunty to. 64 bit and
128 bit - why not go to 128 or 256 bit compilers in one jump? ok so the
processors to run it are not there yet, well one can only dream eh? I
would settle for int128 for now (extension to int64).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>Thinking beyond mobiles, the generation
beyond them will be smaller not bigger. Maybe there will be display
glasses that can be put on to get the advantage of a huge screen display just
like we have earphones these days rather than speakers. Maybe virtual
keyboards - projected onto a wooden desktop from a small projector. Likely
it will have a fast broadband online connection to ones home server where the
data and programs actually are.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial>For Microsoft my prediction would be to bite
the bullet, evaluate the Windows kernel, and if it is inferior to the various
linux and Unix ones out there ditch it and put Win32 and ..Net and all the other
API's over such a kernel. Its been spectacularly successful for
Apple to do that with OSX, and the Windows development environment
is particularly good</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>John</DIV>
<DIV> <BR>I have also been through the same era and agree. They
should agressively pursue the cross-platform verison but make a decent job
of it this time.<BR> <BR>Eric<BR> <BR></DIV>
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