>>The point is that firms doing marvelously well in one scenario cannot cling to it as the tide comes in. They need to react.

Yes,,they do, but sometimes the best reaction is to just fold up your tent and do something completely different with your cash and energy.

It doesn't follow that the succeeding technology will be as lucrative as the one being supplanted
A great example is Kodak. Their ROI on film manufacture and processing was huge and they made scads of money at it for decades.
That has all but disappeared, and Kodak is an also ran player in the digital foto market.
Does that mean that Kodak blew it?
They only blew it if investing in digital foto tech was a better investment for the shareholders than were competing investments and that's not clear at all.

Another good example is IBM. Did they blow it by not becoming a leader in PC manufacture as they had been in mainframes?
Their ROI looks pretty good right now and they got out of the business.

One of the posts here pointed to a link (I wish I had saved the linkt) where a tech exec said:
"We are on a burning platform"

All of our platforms seem to be subject to burning now, so it's a good time to let things simmer down for a while and not chase things that might fit the classic depiction:

"It's like mackerel by moonlight
it shineth but it stinketh"









>>but I'm confident in saying that no one is going to feel like they're clinging to .NET for the forseeable future

Yes, but also you were confident that 200,000 Android activations daily was a fib. Verified figures gathered from numerous sources now say 350,000 Android devices shipped every day in Q4 2010, not including the shadowy ones out of China.

In your reference, Gartner says that 33% of business intelligence functionality will be consumed on mobile devices by 2013. In 2 years from a few points to a full third. If you plot the trend, it's a hard upswing that doesn't stop suddenly in 2013. And there's an awful lot of business activity that doesn't count as business intelligence going the same direction, maybe quicker.

But did somebody suggest that mobile has to destroy the PC to succeed? I know that I've said 5 times in this thread that this is not the case and I can think of several others who made the same point.

It was IDC (one of the more successful independent IT prediction crowds) who said that the PC-Centric era is over. Most would agree that the PC supplanted the mainframe and mini but they do still exist today, so I'm fairly sure that IDC does not expect the PC to vanish overnight. Its relevance will diminish and people who make their living writing apps need to decide whether they see their future in the cloud or at the frontend. You've said you think that division is naff but it's inescapable In my honest opinion and people need to figure out their place rather than just boxing on.

DEC is an example of a firm that did remarkably well with its PDP series but was slow to react to the PC and then to the Web. It faded away. At its height it employed 120,000 people and was instrumental in many areas of IT but it ended up being rolled into Compaq where it effectively vanished. Compaq had risen to fame by embracing the PC and mostly ignoring the Mini, even though the Mini market still existed.

The point is that firms doing marvelously well in one scenario cannot cling to it as the tide comes in. They need to react. At this point surely you agree that NET became 1.5% less relevant for the mobile front end during the WP7 launch while Android shoved iOS out of the way and is at Blackberry's heels. Mono might allow NET apps to work on these prevalent devices but it might not too. Which is why I nominated javascript and SQLite: both realistic cross-platform options today and likely to stay that way for a while.

Perhaps you should describe how you anticipate NET fitting into this new world where mobile access increasingly is an expectation and the benefits of lease/cloud rather than capital expense are expected to be compelling? I know there are lots of labels and whizzy bits, but if the focus is cloud and mobile, where is the fit? If you're saying that staying focusing on PC opportunity is the best strategy, I have to ask whether you think that is more reminiscent of DEC or of Compaq?

"Laugh while you may" -- Captain Charles Morris

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