I've enjoyed playing with Lion, the new Mac operating system, this week. The native apps really fly, interface gestures have matured and desktop spaces finally feels intuitive enough to allow me to navigate multiple screens of work with ease. My computer doesn't just feel faster - I feel faster. So in a way, my mind got the upgrade. And that perhaps is really the most significant part of the Lion launch - the upgrade process. It was seamless. I clicked buy on the Mac App store, went to bed, and woke up with a new operating system.

Compare that with the glory days of Microsoft. Now this may test some of your memories, but I can still quite clearly remember the launch of Windows 95. If the Baby Boomers got the summer of 69, for us Gen Xers - we had to make do with August 24, 1995. With the power chords of the theme song ‘Start Me Up’ - Bill Gates did his best to channel Rolling Stones cool, there were 

huge tech launch parties, and a promotional campaign that in the modern age, would have put a geek in the White House. The marketing circus was excessive but necessary - because a bit like an election, you had to persuade people to get out of bed and into stores, hand over a $100 (in nineties dollars) and then spend hours of their lives figuring out a complicated software upgrade process.

Now consider the Lion experience - $30, no retail packaging or disks, and an automated upgrade process that took me about 30 minutes. Good news for consumers, but maybe not for everyone. Because whoever wins the operating system wars in the future, you can be sure that retailers stand to lose. Already video games are disappearing from shelves, and now that enterprise software is moving to the Cloud - I doubt you will find any shrink wrapped products on shelves within the next five years. But don’t get too excited. If you really believe the Cloud manifesto - in the future, the whole concept of client side ‘software upgrades’ disappears too.