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If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing, it's been interesting to watch the world change around Microsoft and slowly render the software giant impotent at a time when newspapers continue to hang around and even start new print publications.

While it is surely premature to pronounce dead a company with a 263.2 billion USD market capitalization, the writing is on the wall: the era of the PC has ended. The Web is the center of the universe and the PC is just one of many peripherals.

Now Microsoft is saying that openly. After a series of high-profile failures (PlaysForSure, Zune, and now Vista) from Redmond, it needs to change its way of thinking from top to bottom to embrace Web services. (This is why it wants to buy Yahoo, an effort that I think will fail even if it succeeds.)

The problem is that MS has no particular advantage as a service provider -- other than mountains of available cash to fund development, which often is not the advantage you might expect. On the minus side, it has a demonstrated track record of incompetency and inability to stick with an idea long enough to make it work.

Just this week Microsoft told people who made purchases from its failed MSN Music online store that "as of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers."

Microsoft is surrounded by smart, more agile competitors, many of which have nothing to lose. As we move from desktop to mobile-centric Internet access, free Linux -- especially in the form of the Google-financed Android project -- will be the dominant platform. This will lead to an explosion of small-scale disruptive, innovative development, overwhelming Microsoft like an attack of fire ants.

Is there any value to newspapers in studying this, other than misery loving company?

I think it illuminates two options for newspaper companies, which are in many ways in the same trap as Microsoft.

One path is to embrace and leverage processes modeled on the principles of "open source" development, as Google is doing. This requires abandoning the arrogant hostility toward the reader that you find in many newsrooms, banning the language "unwashed masses" from thought as well as conversation. The Founding Fathers referred to "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," a concept disturbingly absent among many journalists who are eager to latch onto other concepts expressed in that era, such as freedom of the press.

The other path is suggested by a line generally attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody." This essentially is Apple's path, the closed system where value is created through enforced simplicity and clarity. But can newspapers cleverly express anything? The quality of writing, and the quality of thought, in most of America's 1,400 or so newspapers is not encouraging.

My rule of thumb is a simple one: Use the right tool for the right job. The Internet's strength is collaborative interaction; print's strengths are linearity, focus and serendipitous discovery.

So in my world newspapers should use the Internet to execute a Google-like, open-source-inspired, conversational approach to journalism, while remaking print around focus, quality, depth and thought-provoking discovery. I'm troubled when I see newspapers trying to badly copy the Web's strengths into print (i.e. those awful Page 2 summaries of news you already know about) and failing to invest in journalism worth reading.

So in my vision of the future, the Web is not exactly the center of the media universe. It's one of the centers, and it's optimized for open interaction and community-driven conversation. Print should focus on our need for periodic escape from the cacophony of the bazaar. If we do that, perhaps newspapers will still be around for awhile. Maybe even longer than Microsoft. Who knows?

Neil McIntosh loves his little new Eee: "Don’t you just love the sound of.. er… paradigms being shifted in the morning?"

I've written previously about the significance of disruptive, low-end products in general, and Linux for consumers in particular. And I've noted that my kids, my mother, and my mother-in-law are all running Linux.

As McIntosh notes, it's the network, not the computer, that counts. As prices continue to drop, as open-source tools displace expensive proprietary systems, as Moore's Law and miniaturization continue to put more and more power into the hands of more and more people, the so-called digital divide just fades away.

In some ways a milestone is just a rock. In other ways it signifies the end of one thing and the beginning of something new. A couple of milestones this week:

The end of "I can't afford a computer:" Wal-Mart and Everex are offering a reasonably capable desktop PC for a breakthrough regular price of $199, which is less than the price of one night in a New York hotel room. It's not one of those "we only have two at that price" deals; it's available online and at many retail stores starting tomorrow. Look for this to further screw up conventional tech retailers, as Wal-Mart's flat-screen TV maneuver did last year.

The Google desktop: The aforementioned Everex runs a special Google-centric desktop on a Linux kernel. It's probably not the same one that's been rumored for awhile, but it demonstrates that Netscape's 1997 "Webtop" vision was right, after all. Bad news for Microsoft, which is so last century.

The coming Google hegemony: The aforementioned search giant is now the fifth largest company in the United States in terms of market value, closing in on AT&T. Unlike the bogus valuations being attributed to Facebook, this one is real.

The network of social networks: Google, hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Ning, Salesforce and Oracle are announcing tomorrow a set of open interfaces for programming "social networking" tools that talk to one another. The walls around the garden just got a lot lower.

Larry Magid has a warm and fuzzy piece about Linux on the desktop on nytimes.com today.

I previously wrote about how my elderly mother is now running Linux on her laptop, which was unusable under Microsoft Vista.

My mother-in-law also is running Linux as a result of a hard disk failure on her PC. I stuck an Ubuntu Live CD in the disk drive and let her run from CD for a couple of weeks, then installed a new hard drive and made Linux permanent last weekend.

In terms of day-to-day usability, there's really no difference between Vista and Linux (or for that matter Mac OSX), except for Vista's habit of bombarding you with security warnings.

A web browser is a web browser. Email programs are pretty much all alike. In fact, we generally run OS-specific versions of the same software on all three platforms.

Last weekend was Middle Daughter's 15th birthday, and she got an Acer 3680 laptop. I was surprised that it took over 30 minutes to run Vista for the first time. I started grandma's Linux hard disk installation at the same time, and Linux won.

Linux came up fast and snappy on an aging desktop with 256 megs of memory. Vista came up slow and squishy, full of popups and bearing a prominent warning (probably from antivirus banditware) that the system had serious security issues.

The Acer has "only" half a gig of memory, so Vista is slow. It's not as bad as my mom's dual-core Toshiba was (which is to say: useless), but both Microsoft and Acer should be ashamed.

So I installed Linux on a second disk partition. Installation was fast, easy and automated.

Up and running. Fast and snappy. Tons of software.

Then a problem arose: wireless networking.

Linux has excellent networking software, but the Atheros wi-fi hardware comes from one of those companies that doesn't provide Linux drivers, or cooperate with Linux developers. Worse, they revise their hardware in ways that break perfectly good drivers.

So the developers have to guess. I managed to get the wi-fi working using some guessware that I tracked down using Google, but that introduced some nasty bugs that occasionally lock up the laptop. Not good.

These problems undoubtedly will be fixed soon, probably without any help from Atheros, but in the meantime Middle Daughter is stuck with slow-and-squishy Vista and its security and usability problems.

The bottom line is pretty much the same as Magid outlined in his NYT piece. Linux is ready. Grandma can use it. Kids can use it. Installation is not a problem. In many dimensions, especially performance, security and nagware-free user experience, it's superior.

If you don't collide with hardware that the manufacturer won't support on Linux, you're set.

If you do, you're stuck, at least until the Linux developers guess their way to success.

In July I ranted about Microsoft Vista, sparked by my elderly mother's acquisition of a laptop computer that came infested with it. I vowed to replace it with Linux, and the result was a prominent link on Google searches for "I hate Vista," a steady stream of comments from irritated Vista users, and a couple of angry rants from Microsoft fanboys.

I spent the holiday weekend in Columbia, Mo., where my mother lives, and where I'm speaking Tuesday at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. And I took advantage of the opportunity to make good on my threat.

I discovered that Toshiba had shipped Vista on a dual-core laptop with only 512MB of memory. With that hardware, Vista is unusable. Clicking on any application took three to five minutes just to get a window open. The options were: Spend a hundred or so on additional RAM, or nuke Vista forever. I took the easy option.

Now Ubuntu Linux is installed. Launching Firefox takes three seconds. Opening email is instantaneous. Connect a camera via USB and it's detected automatically. Picasa imports and organizes everything. It all Just Works. And no viruses, or popups, or popups from antivirus programs.