Sunday 19 December 2010

The future of C#, the bloat explosion, and what happened instead

Looking back on this video with Anders Hejlsberg, about the future of C#, from march 2009, or this blog post about the upcoming bloat explosion, seems quite awkward with the current explosion of iOS and especially Android. There are numerous awkward parts in the video: The focus on objects, the "huge amounts" of memory and the statement that multithreading is the exception.

As readers of this blog know, Google has a famous quote in their designing for performance article about programming Java for Android: Avoid creating objects. Also, on mobile platforms, there is not plenty of memory, in the contrary, and multithreading is a vital necessity in order to achieve a reasonable responsiveness. Energy efficiency has become very important, and Apple even introduced a ban on runtimes. Also, Python and PHP is on the rise, it actually makes sense to raise venture capital for PHP-based projects these days.

It seems that Microsoft and Anders have simply planned for the wrong future - assuming that the trend would continue, and that complexity, bloat and computer sizes would continue to rise. However, the world has gone low-energy, low-complexity and small computers, instead.

I wonder how such a video would look if Anders was interviewed today.

Friday 10 December 2010

Android sells better than Windows to consumers

If you combine a few news articles, things get interesting:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/29/apple-ipad-cannibalising-pc-sales

"Gartner forecasts that worldwide PC shipments for 2011 will reach 409m units" = 1.1 million per day. It is fair to expect less than 40% of these sales to be for consumers. This is an 18% growth, meaning that in 2010, we can expect PC sales to reach 138 million for consumers, or 379.000 per day. Worldwide.

http://sify.com/news/google-says-300-000-android-devices-activated-daily-news-international-kmklkngheci.html

"Google says 300,000 Android devices activated daily"

My guess is, that in many countries, Android is already selling more than Windows PCs to consumers, and the number of countries where this happens, is increasing. Overall, we can expect smartphones as a category to outdo PC as an entire category, in 2011:

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-smartphone-sales-to-beat-pc-sales-by-2011-2009-8

"Smartphone Sales To Beat PC Sales By 2011"

I just bought an HTC Tattoo for the sole purpose of using it as a server (small batch jobs, surveillance, remote control via SMS) in my home, and I wouldn't wonder if we would see more home servers running Android. It is very easy to set up and configure.