The question is : Does the desktop matter anymore?

On my first reading of the blog entry Does the desktop matter anymore? I kinda agreed to the discussion until a thought came to my mind. Here goes...

In today's world what is the desktop ? about 90% MSFT and 10% rest of the world.

So to me the question is really "Does microsoft's PC strategy matter any more?" OR put it in a different way - Since computing is moving on the server and network is really turning out to be the computer , Do we need to bother about who controls the desktop. My answer is - Damm well we do.

If MSFT had its way in 1996-2000 the world would probably be a different place. The millions of mobiles devices we are talking about would have only synced up with your Windows operating system. Who knows instead of WIKI's and blogs , FileSharing would have evolved into a social network. And the worst nightmare could have been that the desktop still played a *VERY CENTRAL* role in a highly networked world by having a set of standards for the web that required you to be on a MSFT PC . (example - Microsoft Sharepoint). And we probably would not be having this discussion today that the desktop is irrelevant.

So in my opinion desktop applications innovation (via open office , linux , Mac , etc ) has to and should continue to be able to give a new avatar to the traditional PC in a Web2.0 world.

Refer also to the post of why open office and google documents need to integrate.