Windows 8 will mark 'the end' of the 

Microsoft OS : Marc Benioff

 Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 will mark "the end" of the computer industry's dominant OS due to increasing competition and choice sparked by alternatives, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff predicted Friday.

Windows 8 is a catalyst or "gambit" for CIOs, forcing them to say "am I going to Windows 8, or am I going to something else," Benioff said during a question-and-answer session at Salesforce.com's Cloudforce event in New York, which was webcast.

Years ago, "a common phrase was, 'the Windows 7 upgrade cycle,'" Benioff added. "You're not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. I'm not saying that as a big, aggressive statement against Microsoft, that's just the reality of today's environment."

Windows has become "irrelevant," being displaced by next-generation LTE wireless networks that will "disintermediate" the need for WANs and LANs, along with "all of these great services that are available right off the cloud."

"Now, we're not completely there," Benioff added. "Everything is not heterogenous client, everything is not LTE, everything is not cloud ... But we're going to this great new place in our industry."

A Microsoft representative declined to comment on Benioff's remarks.

In an effort to validate his claims, Benioff referred to a conversation he had with a global CIO recently, whom he did not name.

"Her goal is to get rid of all of the PCs," Benioff said. "She doesn't see a demand curve from users for PCs." Instead, the CIO is hoping to move to a BYOD (bring-your-own-device) approach, Benioff said. Next-generation mobile devices have "forced CIOs to make changes already," he added.

Of course, Benioff is hardly the only person predicting that Windows 8 may be in trouble. His claim also serves Salesforce.com well, since its software is cloud-delivered to multiple platforms and devices, not installed in a customer's data center and run solely on PCs.

Also Friday, Benioff touched upon Salesforce.com's ongoing attempt to become "the customer company," in the sense of a vendor that can provide tools and services for connecting companies with their customers. That's meant a primary focus on sales, marketing and collaboration software, but Salesforce.com recently took a small step into human resources applications with the introduction of Work.com for employee performance management.

It's also formed partnerships with cloud ERP (enterprise-resource-planning) vendors such as Workday. But on Friday, Benioff maintained that Salesforce.com isn't keen on going further into back-office processes for now. "We integrate with the back-office providers like SAP and Oracle but we want to be that dominant front-office provider, and that's the piece we're focused on," he said.

Salesforce.com has also been presenting itself as a vendor that can help companies become "social enterprises," with many aspects of the business becoming infused with a social-networking.

  

Google Dart :NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Let's begin with the good news. Google's Dart is a modern, full-featured tool designed by grabbing the best features of Java, JavaScript, and C. The development team is obviously large, and the samples show they have the ambition and talent to create a system that will power desktop, mobile, and browser applications in the future. The tools are real, and the path to gaining widespread acceptance is one that Google can travel. The platform works.

There really isn't any obvious bad news, but there is plenty of cold, hard reality that appears after one plays with the code for a bit. The documentation is upbeat and highlights how Dart is fixing the pet peeves of the Dart creators -- peeves that many of us probably share. But the Dart developers are not superhumans, and they did not find new breakthroughs to taming the way that software turns into a jungle of vines. At best, it's not even clear that they did more than remove some hard corners and smooth over some rough edges. Their fixes work for them, but like all fixes in laws and software, they're bound to create new problems down the road.

Not all of the moves will have this effect. Almost everyone I know who writes JavaScript for the Web also uses a library like jQuery to smooth out the differences among browsers. I'm sure every one of them also wonders why someone hasn't made jQuery part of the official JavaScript spec or permanently baked it into the browser.

The developers of Dart heard these cries and added most of the goodness from these libraries to Dart. They've gotten rid of the lengthy names like getElementsByTagName and replaced them with a catch-all function called query that takes jQuery-like parameters to find what you want.

They've also smoothed out the internal data structures describing the DOM. The fields of each DOM element now use standard data structures. That means you don't need to remember method calls like hasChildNodes and firstChild. You just need to know that there's a field "node" that responds to the standard collection methods. These seem like perfectly obvious solutions and I'm thrilled with them.