THE DEATH OF SOFTWARE

InformationWeek caught my eye today. Entitled "China E-Book Firm Challenges PDF", the article is obviously a sign of the times: The era of Chinese global economic domination is fast approaching, as the millions of graduates from the highly efficient Chinese education system are entering innovation and tech development.

On a more personal note, as I am currenty experiencing the latest abominable Adobe bug a.k.a. plugin, I also welcome any and all competition that Adobe might encounter, being no fan - to put it mildly - of Adobe's memory-gobbling and constantly bugging applications. I left Adobe PDFs for FoxIt ages ago, enjoying immensely how everything instantly sped up the very moment my Control Panel closed, and good riddance.

But the real attention-grabber in InformationWeek was the fact that the Chinese are not challenging Adobe on Adobe's home turf the computer, whether we are talking servers, stationary PCs or laptops: They are going straight for the money-pumping jugular of the future: the handhelds - the pad and the phone.

I mean, why should they? As cloud computing is replacing personal software on home computers, there will be no money in developing generalist software for the personal computer. When Microsoft launched MS Office 2010, the reviews were scorching: "What do we need this for? We've got OpenOffice, Photobucket, gMail etc. We don't need this." Despite its advanced features and improved lay-out, MS Office 2010 was obsolete even before it hit the stores.

And speaking of software ... Haven't you noticed? The word is dying in public use, as the everyday dichotomy of "hard" and "soft" of the personal computer era is being replaced by the word application. The two words have co-existed, being more or less synonomous, but the word application is a word for the future, as hardware and software are becoming more or less indistinguishable from one another for the average consumer. The market for software-in-a-box is evaporating faster than the Arctic ice cap.

Time flies, and the Chinese are right on the mark: Anyone even thinking of launching a competing alternative to MS Office today, is totally out of sync with the future, a stark raving Rip Van Winkle. Just like the Norwegian company Norske Skog Union, which infamously some years ago decided that paper production for newspapers (!) was a sustainable road to future glory and prosperity.

Results from the Technology WC:
Microsoft-China 0-1
Adobe-Beijing Founder Apabi Technology - TBA on a pad or a phone near your hand.

May the best applicationmaker win.