Today, Marc Benioff, the ever-vocal CEO of salesforce.com made a blog post over at Fortune on the end of Microsoft. In his post he outlines Microsoft’s latest ad campaigns, the ones spouting off about Windows 7 being "my idea." He pokes fun at one in particular where Windows no longer crashing was somehow deemed a feature.

Is that how low our expectations are these days? Certainly not in general, and it is a sad state of affairs for Microsoft that crashing is one of the expected behaviors of a Windows device.

He goes on further to point out the explosive growth and success of sites like Facebook and YouTube. These consumer websites have absolutely changed people’s expectations of what a web experience should be like: engaging, easy to navigate and providing loads of value.

Here at Model Metrics those themes ring true for everything we build. We do nothing but cloud computing, which is really what Facebook and YouTube are all about. Computing in the workplace has historically lagged behind what’s available at home. That’s no longer true. With technology from salesforce.com, Google, Adobe and Apple getting things done at the office is as easy as using your favorite personal websites.

While Microsoft isn’t leaving any time soon, newer technologies are showing better promise than the failed paradigm of machines prone to crashing.

Follow ReidCarlberg on Twitter or contact him at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.

Hey Stumbleupon — welcome!  You might also enjoy "Import Your App from Excel".

Gmail experienced an outage in Europe overnight.  There’s some handwringing and frustration about it.  But you know what? I don’t care.  Here’s why.

1. The last significant Gmail outage looks to have been in August.  Four months ago.  My old email provider, which cost about $25,000 more per year than our enterprise Google account (which includes a whole lot more), used to “have some issues” (as we put it) about once every four weeks. 

2. Google’s Gmail ops team is working on this.   Correct that – they worked on it and it’s already fixed.  I didn’t have to do anything.  I didn’t have to submit a ticket.  I didn’t have to call.  I didn’t have wonder if anyone else was having the problem.  It’s fixed.

3. No matter what the problem was, I’m not going to have to go out and buy a new server or install a patch.  I’m not going to have to do anything other than wait a few minutes and try again.  Awesome.

4. No matter what the problem was, I’ll bet you $100 I didn’t lose any data and that you didn’t either.  The sum total cost of the problem was inconvenience.  Although that can feel significant, it’s so much better than incurring substantial actual real dollar costs.

So that’s it.  Gmail is back up and all that’s left to do is complain.  But I’m going to ignore the complainers on this one.  This is definitely no big deal.

It’s the time of year for predictions.  Everyone has their prognostication hat on. My thoughts?  We’ll need a buzzword for all those servers we’re killing.  It should be slightly negative.

I call dibs on "dirt computing". 

From what I can tell, 2009 is not likely to be a good year for dirt computing.