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And the Winners are:


Grand Prize: Gates Builds Shivas

Although this is not a serious, probable reason for the disappearance of Microsoft, it was humorous enough to win the contest. Request For Assistance! We have been unable to locate winner of the Grand Prize, his email address has been discontinued. If anyone knows the person who wrote this winning future, please tell him to contact me. To prove his identity, he must tell me the email address he was using at the time of submission.


Runner Up 1: Desktops replaced by Palmtops

This submission by Bernard Gaidasz comes closest to agreeing with my own personal opinion of what will happen. Consider that IBM's monopoly on mainframe computers was never broken: it still exists, as strong as ever, even today. The answer about the mainframe monopoly never changed; rather, we stopped asking the question, because we didn't care, because we understood that those mainframes were in competition with substitute products from outside the monopolized class of products - you could switch to a network of smaller computers if push came to shove. I personally believe the thrust that will make Windows desktops obsolete will be the need for real security when we move into digital cash. The computers that hold our money will be the ones we care about, and not even the most loyal Microsoft employee can take Windows seriously as a computing platform secure enough to hold his life savings (well, that's probably an exaggeration...lots of Microsoft employees are very loyal, and not many of them know enough about security to understand how unserious it is :-). We'll have to move to something new (and no, Linux is not the answer, either, Linux is even worse on security than Windows in many ways; the only real advantage Linux has is that, being open sourced, it is not possible for a random programmer in the company to sneak a patch into the OS that opens up a back door, as was just discovered in April 2000 in Windows).


Runner Up 2: Bill buys Russia, Steve Jobs takes over Microsoft

This is another humorous one, and once again I am requesting help from the reader's of this page, since the author of this winner has not responded to email. One suspects that email describing how you just won a contest is immediately thrown out by most people because they assume it is spam. Sigh. If you want to see an early implementation of the EarthWeb strategy for defeating spam, so we can send each other mail like this and believe it, check out http://www.flyingrat.org.



All Contestants for the EarthWeb Prize are here.

You've read the book; you've even glanced at a couple of the URLs in the Appendix and here at the EarthWeb site. There is, of course, one major episode of human history left undescribed in EarthWeb, an event almost as big and important as the Crash that led to the privatization of most government functions: what ever happened to Microsoft and Windows?

A Prize is hereby offered for the best explanation of Microsoft's fate. The winner of the prize will receive 50 books of his choice from Baen Books; several runners up will qualify for 5 books each. The winning explanation will be selected based on the following 3 criteria:

  • 1) Originality

  • 2) Humor

  • 3) Excellence as a forecast (i.e., the likelihood that this really will be what happens to Microsoft and Windows)  

If you have a personal favorite explanation of what happened to the Microsoft juggernaut in the future history of EarthWeb, email us your idea. But before you rush to make your submission, check out the explanations already proposed in the EarthWeb discussion room(if you've already logged in to the Baen conference rooms, use the same username and password; if you have not, creating a name and password for yourself is pretty quick and easy, or enter as Guest for a quick look). See if someone has already beaten you to the punch, or see if someone has a better idea that you can improve on--because this is a collaborative effort. The runners-up will be chosen from the pool of participants in the discussion who helped refine a good idea into the winning, hopefully great, forecast.

Once you're sure you've got the winning proposal in hand, formally submit it here via email. Then make sure that everyone in the discussion room knows your proposal, so that they can help improve it, making you (and them) a winner.

The contest deadline is January 1, 2000. Prize winners will be announced February 15, 2000, after a selection process that will include voting by the participants; come back on January 2, 2000 to help us pick the winner.

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