Is Microsoft getting phased out?

There is a lot of material on the net which talks of Microsoft being dead. But is that the truth?
What is it that makes people think in that manner? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.
1. The most obvious is Google. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. There can only be one big man in town, and day by day it is being felt that they're clearly it.
2. Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the second cause of why people started thinking of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.
3. The third cause is broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.
4. Last but not the least is Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology

But is that the end of the road.

Of course, as an entrepreneur I can't help thinking about how something broken could not be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? I think, yes.

To see how, envision two things:
(a) The amount of cash Microsoft now has on hand, they can do almost anything
(b) The Windows Mobile technology which was rated much lower in the early part of this century is something to reckon with in today’s date. As the mobile population grows this can be the next big thing for Microsoft which can turn things around.

and there are many more...

Gartner Reports ..Creating Business Value from Technology Innovation

Mobile technology is fast emerging from the gadget stage. Today, there are hundreds of real-world examples of mobile technology empowering knowledge workers and adding real value to important business processes.

But getting to real value isn't always straightforward. Mobile and wireless technologies are changing fast and notoriously averse to standardization. Users will continue experiencing technology fragmentation, interoperability issues and rapid obsolescence in the coming years. Mobile networks are evolving towards 3.5G. WiMax and WiBro are changing the face of wireless broadband. Consumerization is morphing mobile phones into a diverse range of rich multimedia entertainment devices. Mobility and convergence are transforming VoIP, IM, email and presence technologies while Web 2.0 brings a new dimension to mobility. Clearly, making decisions in such a dynamic environment is a major challenge for enterprises hoping to harness the power of new mobile and wireless solutions. The entire industry is still gripped by the titanic struggle between mobile operators, device manufacturers, content providers, media brands and traditional IT giants. They all want to control the mobile user experience without sacrificing their role in the complex mobile value chain. In such an evolving context, what strategies should enterprises adopt to be successful with mobility? How can you take advantage of the ongoing disruptive transformation and create business value out of technology innovation? As a service provider, how can you continue to grow in such a dynamic and competitive industry? Waiting for the mobile and wireless markets to sort themselves out is not an option. You need to make decisions today that will affect your organization's ability to mobilize in the future.

Doing Something more ...

I had been pondering over this idea of doing nothing for sometime but somehow it is not happening and niether does it seem to happen in the near future. Much of the time goes for making money for self and company.... Life is amazing.

It seduces you towards itself and just puts you on one of those toy horses. You feel that you are moving because the horse is moving back and forth but what you don't realize is that horse is on a static platform which is not moving. The horse knows that it can fool the human being and give it a false sense of moving as human being seldom see things beyond what they are shown by their senses and people around them.

Here is my 5 point agenda for what I should be doing more often than just working ....
1. Blog more often at http://yak123.blogspot.com/
2. Spend some time thinking ... thinking not only of work but about my life as whole
3. Learn Lawn Tennis, swimming
4. Spend more and more time with my little cutie pie, Sarah
5. Meditation

Not sure if I will be able to complete all of them but I am sure journey should be interesting.

Using Google Maps with Photo Album

This site has a tutorial on using Google Maps with your photo album. Each album has a latitude and longitude so it shows up as a pin on a map of the world. When you click a pin, up pops the highlight photo for the albums at that location. Clicking again brings up that album. Makes a great front page to a gallery. Includes a demo with 200 albums from the author's travels. He provides all his code for interfacing with Google maps. Seriously awesome feature for people who travel a lot.