I have Vista Home Basic. Exploring Vista bit by bit and dll by dll using “Administrative Priveleges” I was surprised to find that these “priveleges” allowed me access to almost nothing of importance that isn’t directly managed by a “Control Panel” program, and to not all those that were so managed. Unfortunately, in order to get some non-MS programs (and some older MS programs) to work on my PC, I need access beyond the Control Panel to disengage and re-engage certain supposed “security” functions. To add insult to injury, on certain programs Vista keeps popping up nag screens either asking if I am the Administrator, or telling me out-right that I’m not, when I’m already logged on that I am! when I wanted to report such problems to MS online, they had download some in-house spy-ware which was supposed to provide them all the information; when I activated it, the MS site reported that their own spyware was faulty, and warned that it could be spyware; at any rate, it did nothing but compile information for MS and drop cookies which I was fortunate enough to wipe from my PC before they had a chance to settle.

What Microsoft wants is total access/ total control of our computers. That’s not “conspiracy theory” – that’s monopoly capitalism. Such control not only forces us to continue spending bucks on “upgrades”, it also keeps users as commodities in the MS access market, which has become essential to the Internet.

Joe, the paperless office is one of my favorite predictions. I love to predict this already for about 20 years. Guess why! Because I am very unsatisfied with the current situation.

This argument supported Apple’s marketshare as well as they used to market that their systems were simple enough to use to not need as much support. Look at what you have…Macs didn’t get as accepted as techs/admins didn’t want them as they would have to work with something they knew nothing about and if it was simple, jobs might be cut.

Now we Macs being somewhat more complex with a bigger attraction to techs/geeks. Marketshare now grows.

Of course on the other side of the fence many never predicted how bad security would get and how the internet would play a role in things. We’re still a bit in the infancy of computers on the internet. Look back at some roadmaps MS had previous to the internet boom and you’ll see that they are just now getting back to some of the features that they were working on back then but stopped to change direction to account for the internet.

Some day some of this might get easier but I’m with you it’s gotten incredibly tough to keep up on this stuff like I used to be able to and others in my field I know personally say the same thing. It also used to be fun but not so much anymore.

As for predictions I do think it’s possible if people keeps certain things in perspective by looking at previous examples and move beyond the hype. For instance how long have they been talking about how web-based apps are going to replace native apps? That conversation is so old it’s tiresome. I never saw it back in the mid-90’s and still don’t see it. It might happen someday but still not anytime soon. Simply put there aren’t many with good vision who make these predictions. Typically they’re biased based off of some business model they formulated first without thinking about how to get to point b from a. In my opinion I think we’ll probably see virtualized apps streamed off MS servers first(softgrid anyone?) as a service but that’s my prediction which is based off of what technology there is today and not technology of tomorrow. I don’t get paid for predictions so I have nothing to lose in making that one.