Are you an IT pro? It's no longer safe to bet your career on Microsoft

All that I seem to be reading here is a Linux, Apple and Microsoft pissing match.

Apples for the 60 %dummies out there,

Linux for the 2% Hardore

Windows for everyone else.

I see it hard to believe windows going anywhere in a hurry, it is at the heart of all business. they way things are financially, people are not going to be jumping quick to the alternative,... which is?

Really?

Anyone can post speculative nonsense. The basic rule of the game has always been and always will be keep your skills relevant to a sizeable chunk of the market. It really doesn't matter which technology as long as you are willing to change and adapt. If you can't change and adapt you're in the wrong business to start with.

This is a great article.

It reads like something the BOFH would write.

Career change? - the future is web shaped.

IT Pro's could conceivably move into web development.

If predictions and trends turn out to be on the money, Saas driven by web technology is the direction the industry is headed.

It's almost a full circle back to the days of the 'dumb terminal', where the computing power was derived from the mainframe.

The similarities are there to be examined. The 'cloud' is the mainframe, the web browser is the 'dumb terminal'

Google are pushing a massive stake in the ground when it comes to web based applications.

Online email is hardly new, but online 'office' style applications certainly are.

Imagine a future when your 'mainframe' (the cloud) is serving your entire companies office software requirements. Need to upgrade the entire companies office suite? Do it once, in the cloud.

Microsoft's business model is dying, slowly, but still dying.

The idea of purchasing multiple licenses of an office suite and having to install and maintain it on hundreds of computer hard drives will become an archaic concept.

Inaccurate

"Developers face the problem that MS doesn’t love them anymore, seeing us as disloyal peasants, best expressed when Visual Studio Express was intentionally crippled to produce only Metro (or No-tro, or whatever it’s called) apps."

You're 5 months out of date. Microsoft relented on that and have a version for Windows 8 and for Windows desktop. Because they... errr... listened to those "disloyal peasants".

Personally, as an ASP.NET/C#/SQL/XAML developer, the one thing that I'll always credit Microsoft for is that they love developers. I got a free day covering Azure, days like the DDD days, free evenings with pizza going over technologies, Microsoft people on Twitter and blogs who are happy to talk about stuff.

And honestly, ASP.NET MVC is a dynamite development platform. Nothing comes close for building a solid web application.

Be platform-independant

Surprised no real mention of platform-independent coding. I'd have thought Python, Qt or WxWidgets for GUI, other platform-independant libraries deserve a mention. Even Java, if Oracle don't (accidentally?) kill it by getting it banned from every business PC as a security nightmare.

What I'd like to see is a new Windows which starts with an NT codebase like XP or Windows 7, and then modularizes everything. And I do mean everything; it should only take a dozen or so small-to-medium-sized files to boot into Safe Mode, with everything else loading after. Like old Windows and 'NIX boxes, it would have a command line "core", but it would be 64-bit and fully featured like the DOS of old (and the Linux of today). Due to it's modular nature, you could upgrade individual pieces of the OS with different vendors' software easily; or even "better" editions of Microsoft's own.

For ease of sales, MS would still sell boxed and OEM copies in particular configurations (Home, Workstation, Server, etc.), but this new approach would also let them digitally sell custom .isos of the OS specified to that company or vendor. Why include Media Player on a business machine when your company writes it's own media software? Your business is international, but the home office only uses, say, 3 languages, so why pay for 50? And so on.

And, again, being modular, a company or individual could always pay to upgrade a particular piece of the OS they might want later. It'd let MS become the service company it dreams of being, without screwing up the few good things it's always done (being consistent, for starters). This would have an added bonus of ending Service Pack headaches as you'd only need to patch the pieces installed on your system; rather then how it is now, where a Firefox or Chrome user still needs to keep IE updated 'cause of it's hooks into the rest of the OS.