For the past couple of years hardware manufacturers have been producing 64-bit systems. Microsoft produced a 64-bit version of Windows XP about seven years ago and for those poor bastards who actually loaded windows XP they realized that they were in a precarious situation because they were running an operating system that was not supported by just about anybody.

Right now majority of the laptops and PCs are being sold are 64-bit systems. 64-bit operating systems are still being considered illegitimate. No one want to put any time or effort into supporting a 64-bit operating system.

When a customer purchases a 64-bit operating system, or PC, the majority of the software that they’re going to be loading is 32-bit. 32-bit applications should run fine on a 64-bit operating system, but surely there’s going to be exceptions.

Mozilla has produced a 64-bit version of its Firefox [Minefield] browser, but Adobe has not produced a 64-bit version of their Flash player [YouTube]. Nuance, a world leader in voice recognition, has not produced a 64-bit version of their software and their 32-bit software does not work on 64-bit operating systems [but they’re currently in beta testing]. Even Google, with all their resources, as not produced a 64-bit version of their Web browser Chrome. For the Internet, there are many media players and media interface applications and without the 64-bit version of those interface applications the web is going to take an impact on information delivery.

Microsoft has released that Windows 7 and Windows server 2009 will be the last 32 bit operating systems that are produced. This means that all the software companies that are currently making products for Windows will have to start converting them to 64-bit or make them 64-bit compatible.

Moving from 32 to 64-bit could be a problem if enough companies/developers ignore it long enough. When migrating from Windows XP to Windows Vista, Microsoft released the hardware specifications for Windows Vista which were much higher than the specifications for windows XP. Similar to that if you’re migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit operating systems, you’re going to need 64-bit drivers for your ancillary devices. This is going to be an opportunity for all those hardware and software makers to charge a fee to upgrade or to have the customer purchase all new hardware.

We’ve got approximately 3 more years before there has to be a 64-bit option when downloading software. Hardware manufacturers could provide 64-bit drivers for external devices, but I’m curious to see if they’ll provide new drivers or if they’ll force the customers to purchase new hardware. And if you have a 64-bit browser, but you don’t have the 64-bit media interfaces [Flash Player] to go with them, the browser itself is worthless, because 90% of the websites people visit nowadays have some level of Flash presentation embedded into the website.

So, tick-toc, tick-toc, tick-toc…

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy.

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