The Great Debate UK

Google calls time on the Age of Windows

-Tom Dunmore is Brand Director & Editor-in-Chief at Stuff magazine – Stuff has over 1 million readers worldwide. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Google announced on Wednesday that it was developing its own computer operating system. It will be secure, fast, lightweight and – most of all – free. And it presents the biggest challenge yet to the long-standing dominance of Windows.

The idea behind Google ChromeOS is nothing new – it’s built on a Linux foundation and will no doubt share many of the features of other open-source operating systems. But Google is the only computing brand with more might than Microsoft: it’s trusted, and has a proven track record of building brilliant, free services, from search to instant messaging.

Indeed, Google has been busily chipping away at Microsoft’s market for some time, with the Google Docs suite of in-browser applications providing a decent (and free) alternative to Microsoft Office, while the Android mobile phone software has pulled the rug from under Windows Mobile.

Microsoft’s attempts to strike back by stealing some of Google’s lucrative internet search advertising market have had little success – hence the rebranding of MSN as Live search, and the subsequent replacement of Live search with Bing.

But Microsoft’s core business is the Windows operating system that powers nine in ten of the world’s computers. By launching against Windows, Google is declaring out-and-out war – and doing so when Microsoft is at its weakest.

New iPhone small step towards global domination

-Tom Dunmore is editor-in-chief of Stuff magazine. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Yesterday, Apple unveiled the latest version of its wildly popular iPhone. And it was quite a show, despite the absence of Apple’s usual ringmaster Steve Jobs.

The keynote speech at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco was heaving the massed ranks of the global media, hyped by rumours of mini iPhones, touschscreen Macs and Steve Jobs’ early return from sick leave.

In the end, Apple’s hardware announcement was more prosaic – the new iPhone 3G S looks exactly the same as the old iPhone 3G but is faster, has a better camera, and offers voice control.

But it quickly became clear to the audience that the iPhone is about much more than hardware. Developer after developer took to the stage to show off their new software, which ranged from multiplayer games to a medical application that allows doctors to remotely monitor a patient’s vital signs.

There are already 50,000 programs available from the iTunes App Store, and the 40million iPhone and iPod Touch users have each downloaded an average of 25 apps – taking the total downloads to over 1billion since the App Store launched less than a year ago.

Many app downloads are free, but plenty of developers are making a good living from selling their wares to this growing audience, and the new iPhone 3.0 software – due out on June 17 – will allow them to charge for updates and subscriptions from within their applications.

Can anyone stop the dominance of iTunes?

**Tom Dunmore is Editor-in-Chief of Stuff magazine. The views expressed are his own.**

Amazon’s music download service has finally arrived in the UK. That’s great news for music fans, who will benefit from lower prices and greater choice – but it’s not going to save the music industry from the dominance of iTunes.

After all, Amazon’s download service has been running for a year in America, but it’s still way behind iTunes. In fact, even if you add all of Amazon’s CD sales into the mix, iTunes is still bigger.

Here in the UK, iTunes has well over 50 percent of the music download market (some put the figure as high as 80 percent). And that’s despite Amazon’s biggest online rival Play.com selling MP3 music at knockdown prices for the past six months. Why? Because neither Play.com nor Amazon can match Apple’s integration of iTunes software and iPod hardware.

More importantly for the music industry, despite all the new rivals in the download market, there’s nowhere near enough music being sold to make up for the slump in CD sales.

The last figures published by the BPI, the UK’s music industry body, showed that total year-on-year album sales were down 5.5 percent. Digital sales were up, but not enough: 7.5million less CDs were sold in the first nine months of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007. Download album sales were up less than 3.5m.

And that was before the economic downturn really began to bite. To compound the music industry’s woes, the UK high street’s biggest music retailer, Woolworths, has gone into administration – along with its music distribution arm Entertainment UK.  Supermarkets are having to source their CDs direct from record companies, and megastore operator Zavvi has been forced to cancel all orders through its website.