Especially Charlie who wrote that little gem. According to him, NVidia should have gone bankrupt half a dozen times so far.

I really think they should just start coding for multiple platforms, not just DirectX based systems.

All the more reason to offload it onto someone else with a ready supply of engineers and a blue sky budget (though that figure seems based on conjecture rather than actual stated fact from reading the article).

Valve have a staff of about 160 people most of whom are games orientated, not OS developers (save the Gabus himself).

About half of Valve’s employees are dedicated to working on Steam.

http://steamreview.org/posts/75staff/

Valve have a staff of about 160 people most of whom are games orientated, not OS developers (save the Gabus himself). The idea that they alone could write an entire OS that challenged MS, and one that every software developer would readily write applications for is a tad optimistic, esp given ‘Valve Time’ on delivery issues. Google with thousands of websavvy software engineers and innumerable billions in the bank writing an OS is more likely.

Valve, wielding Steam, have the necessary clout to make ASUS, Gigabyte, nVidia, ATi and the rest write proper drivers for Linux, and then they just have to port Steamworks and the Source engine over and I would already be dual-booting. Your OS would be able to tell you whether or not your rig could run any game, no messing around; with only a stripped-down ultrafast Linux kernel running, you could use lower system specs; and with matchmaking, netcode, voice chat, friends, and clan support at the OS level, PC gamers could finally have the uniformity of quality that systems like Xbox Live have offered for years.

Valve could do this by themselves. Google could do this by themselves, but they’d make it ad-supported and suitable for home leisure use and all the rest. A buyout, or a partnership, would only spread out the focus and risk making it less perfect.

Steam is a method of selling software from the cloud and installing it on PCs

Steam’s much more than just a digital distribution platform. Games are played through Steam. Achievements and stats are recorded by Steam. Multiplayer games servers are talking to Steam. People chat with each other through Steam. Steam is now very much a community and that’s something that’s of great interest to advertisers. Just ask Facebook.

You forgot two crucial steps:

???

Profit!!!

(seriously though, awesome post)

We are a long long way away from being able to work purely in the cloud. Maybe if all you do is write text, but if your doing anything else forget it. Upload/download speeds are mare and very few businesses are ever going to jump into the cloud with both feet because of practicalities. The Cloud is a consumer space, not a commercial space. The opportunity and ability to generate advertising money is still there. A steam acquisition would allow them to complement their online activities with centralised offline models, which would be no bad thing esp when it comes to expanding markets.

Right now when I start up my computer I’ve probably maybe 20 separate applications that are capable of looking for updates of one kind or another, some try automatically, some require me to authorise them. All of them want to use up my machines memory. Personally if I had one central background application that manages all of that garbage and used less memory doing so, I’d be a much happier man. An apps based version of Steam could easily fulfill that role.