by Jean-Louis Gassée
Once upon a time, operating systems used to matter a lot; they defined what a computer could and couldn’t do. The “old” OS orchestrated the use of resources: memory, processors, I/O (input/output) to external devices (screen, keyboard, disks, network, printers…). It’s a complicated set of tasks that requires delicate juggling of conflicting constraints, and every OS handled them differently—or not at all. In those days, the OS was married to the hardware and only a handful of “wizards” with Electrical Engineering degrees—and a deep understanding of circuitry—understood (and invented, and protected) the arcana of OS construction.
Over time, the secrets of these illuminati leaked out. About 20 years ago, the OS lost its mystery. We had learned enough about writing an OS kernel that it became a college-level topic and a Christmas break hack.
Today, there’s only one operating system: Unix. (Okay, there are two, but we’ll get to that.) This is why I contend that the OS doesn’t matter—or that we need to take another look at the word’s content, at what we mean when we say ‘Operating System’.
When RIM decides to go with QNX for its upcoming tablet, the PlayBook, tongues wag. After calling its Blackberry OS the “best of breed” (a tired markitecture phrase), RIM is surrendering to reality: The “proven OS” foundation proved to be unfixable. Because of the layers of software silt that had accumulated over the years, the edifice couldn’t be modernized. Better to quit and make a fresh start. QNX is based on a Unix OS for embedded applications that dates back to 1982(!) when it was first released for the Intel 8088 microprocessor.
The same thing happened at Apple…twice. The Apple ][ OS (or lack thereof, purists will say) couldn’t be brought up to modern standards, so the Macintosh had to be built on a fresh foundation. The original Mac OS foundered on its own beachhead and was replaced by OS X. Based on the Mach kernel, OS X is another Unix derivative, co-authored at CMU by Avie Tevanian. Mr Tevanian improved the system during his tenure as head of software at NeXT and was instrumental in convincing Apple that their purchase of NeXT would breathe new life into the company.
Open the Terminal application on a Mac and what do you see? A noble and worthy Unix “shell”, a program that geeks use to interact with the OS. Terminal uses the bash shell (for Bourne Again Shell. Created by Brian Fox, bash is based on the sh shell, which was invented by Stephen Bourne. Unix mavens love their word-play acronyms).
And now we have the Apple iOS, an OS X derivative that uses bits from the same kernel.
Regard Palm. The sine qua non of handset makers saw that their PalmOS couldn’t be fixed, so they pressed the restart button and created WebOS, a Linux derivative.
Android? It’s based on a Linux kernel. Nokia’s MeeGo? Ditto.
The list goes on. We have the spiritual children of Unix living inside the Cloud, powering the millions of Linux servers running at Google, Facebook, Amazon…
The only exception is Windows. Initially built on top of DOS, Microsoft painstakingly added version after version, always striving for backward compatibility while, at the same time, adding new features. It didn’t always work well (who wants to remember Windows Me and Vista?) but it worked well enough because Microsoft never gave up. They fixed mistakes that they claimed didn’t exist, and now we have the well-respected Windows 7. (Inevitably, critics will say that Microsoft wouldn’t have gotten away with such a tortuous path if it weren’t for its vigorously enforced monopoly.)
Windows will live on — in a PC industry now at a plateau. But otherwise, in the high-growth Cloud and smartphone segments, it’s a Unix/Linux world. We need to look elsewhere to find the differences that matter.
The technical challenges have migrated to two areas: UI (User Interface, or the more poetic—and more accurate—UX, for User Experience) and programming tools.
Now that all “system functions” are similar, the game for hardware and software makers is to convince the user that his/her experience will be smooth and intuitive. Your device will walk on water (with the programmer right under the surface), catch you as you fall, make sure you don’t get your feet wet.
For the developer, what we now call the OS must supply ever-growing expressive power—think a fife versus a twelve-keyboard organ. To wield that expressive power, the programmer needs software tools. The industry uses acronyms such as API (Application Programming Interface), IDE (Integrated Development Environment) or phrases such as Application Frameworks. They define the rules and conventions—which ideas are allowed and how to express them—and the software tools that programmers need to develop an application.
This is today’s OS. User experience. Development tools.
One last element that is and isn’t the OS: This new creature called an App Store (or Marketplace, depending upon the…OS). In my non-technical view, the App Store must be considered part of the OS totality, part of its gestalt. Applications have always been in a feedback loop with the OS. A program can only do as much as the OS allows it, so it played tricks to create multi-tasking, to allow smooth audio/video playback. These “tricks” were incorporated into the OS (and the hardware—think GPU), which then bred another generation of apps that wanted more, and so on.
The App Store genre, invented or not in Cupertino, is now part of that loop, a killer OS component, one that deserves a Monday Note of its own.
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59 Comments
Slight mistake about windows history.
Windows was based on DOS only up to windows me.
Windows XP and later are based on the windows NT kernel that was build on a different foundation than DOS, and that previously targeted the enterprise sector (aka windows server editions…)
I sense that Microsoft knows the server (in this case in particular, ‘web server’) marketplace is somewhere it needs to be in order to keep itself at the plateau (at a minimum) or gain a small amount of market share (unlikely).
The latest marketing pieces at microsoft/web are pretty slick, and although not much of the tech is new, the recent work with WordPress and also pushing PHP as a viable platform within IIS, PLUS providing free tools for developers… shows that they’re at least willing to put up a fight for that market.
I really like Windows 7, but at the same time, I think I like it because of its UX, which is the main point of your article. The same UI, covering Linux underpinnings, would make me just as happy.
“The only exception is Windows. Initially built on top of DOS, Microsoft painstakingly added version after version, always striving for backward compatibility while, at the same time, adding new features. It didn’t always work well (who wants to remember Windows Me and Vista?) but it worked well enough because Microsoft never gave up. ”
This isn’t accurate. Like the other vendors, Microsoft did give up and reboot its OS. The original Microsoft OS was MS-DOS, and it continued in an evolutionary line through Windows 1-3, Windows 95 and finally Windows 98. But in the late 80s they started development on a separate product, which eventually became Windows NT; it was designed by Dave Cutler, who MS hired away from DEC, and was strongly inspired by DEC’s VMS operating system for their VAX minicomputers.
For a time MS had two separate operating system product lines — the NT-derived Windows 2000 for businesses, and the DOS-derived Windows 95/98 for consumers — but they eventually retired the DOS line completely with the release of the NT-derived Windows XP. Vista and 7 are further evolutions of NT.
So in other words, Microsoft did with Windows 2000/XP essentially what Apple did in the shift from OS9 to OS X: jettison an out-of-date architecture and start fresh with a more modern, capable one.
Here’s my explanation for why os doesn’t matter.
New OS is:
html/css/javascript
restful web services
http
everything else [device + compute glue] is abstracted by above
The neat thing is the “device and compute glue” part can be anything from an embedded system to a CDN.
Cheers!
To comments arguing “But Windows isn’t DOS any more”, I think Gassée knows that.
The first word of the sentence you’re objecting to is “Initially”, which means “at the start, but not now”.
There are two OS’s in the *consumer* marketplace. HOWEVER, there is quite a gargantuan ancient monster called MVS or (more fondly – the MAINFRAME) which after 50 years still reigns supreme in the heavy load business servers. This beast has backward compatibility all the way to day one, and is consider by most the most capable of all OS’s.
Just don’t ever try to install it your pc folks…
> The App Store genre, invented or not in Cupertino, is now part of that loop, a killer OS component, one that deserves a Monday Note of its own.
You’re really talking about a crippled version of a package manager here. Unix-heads coming to Macs always have the same complaints–no built-in package manager. In iOS it’s not really any better–there’s a package manager, but I don’t really have any control over it. Neither comes close to the comprehensive experience of apt-get.
Good article and I think the points are valid.
Interesting how many folk don’t know the history of Windows, it is after all well documented. Let me highlight two clear omissions from the potted histories and the key difference with Unix.
First, Windows was originally an application that ran in DOS, you typed win; what changed was Windows 386 which was the first version that jumped into the protected mode of a 386 processor. This allowed virtual DOS windows and full extended memory (16Mb+) access as apposed to 640K and bank switching. This model led through to Windows XP at least.
Second, no one mentioned OS/2 a joint Microsoft & IBM product that was a leap forward for the PC OS’s, however, with the exception of Germany didn’t get much real interest. Then the partnership finished and IBM produced OS/2 Warp which was an exceptional system and Microsoft produced NT different children from the same parent. OS/2 was killed by IBM but remains active in the wild, and NT is where Microsoft’s current server technology hails from.
The key difference is about protection in Unix the applications and device drivers are separated from the system, if they crash the system can close them down with little or no impact on the rest of the system. All Unix works like this but Windows (at least to XP) and OS/2 1.x did not, so a crashing application or driver destabilised the whole system like the blue screen of death. It was also possible in these systems for a device driver to have access to all areas of the system, an unimaginable security breach. These problems don’t exist with Unix systems but I can’t say for current Microsoft OS’s as I gave up at XP and moved to OS X and Linux.
Victor
While the points of the article are correct, it seems to ignore the serial process which has accompanied the development of our industry.
We are all subject to van Neumann architecture which lays out a serialization of instruction processing, and movement of data from memory to registers and back again.
The makers of the van Neumann hardware, IBM, Intel, Motorola, TI etc chose their own implementation but had to have programming that conformed to their hardware, all of which had great similarities.
IBM’s MVS was designed from to manage large virtual address spaces and multiple CPUs and has been around 20 years longer than Windows.
PC OS manufacturers didn’t need the advanced capabilities of the OS in the early days. As software being processed for graphics and other compute and memory intensive tasks required more capabilities so they had to layer those additional capabilities into the OS such as virtual memory and paging and outboard processing through a buss (PCI etc).
Now we’ve exhausted all those attributes and we’re looking for the next boost.
In our industry the next boost always seems to accompany a switch from centralized computing to client server and vice versa. My projection of the future… based on the past.
1975-1980: Mainframe with dumb terminal.
1980-1985 Mainframe with PC and development of the client computer side software
1995-2000 Web servers resemble mainframes with browsers the dumb terminals.
2000-2005 Javascript makes the browser a ubiquitous, client side GUI client again.
2005-2010 Cloud computing. What’s the cloud…. A mainframe with your browser a challenged terminal.
2010-2015 Network speed allows distributed VM’s. The cloud and the client merge finally eliminating either concept !
a.
Ironic that this appears the same week Microsoft attacks Android on patents. Maybe it won’t be such a Unixy world, after all.
And as for diminishing the specific contribution of a particular OS, as an experiment let’s wait to see how many printers Chrome can work with at launch. Assuming it launches.
Why do you think a new OS couldn’t overthrow what’s out now. Systems are becoming more and more distributed and moving towards SOC designs as seen by intel and amd next-gen processors. Linux isn’t geared towards a distributed cohesive system and posix backwards compatibility is becoming more and more painful as anything remotely distributed in Linux shows (union mounts, distributed file systems, checkpoint and restart). It’s becoming to the point where creating something new with Linux driver compatibility would be better than bolting on fixes.
I tried living in this new world were the OS don’t matter. I wen’t back soon after. I need my full functioning OS on my laptop, can’t live without it.
Sorry your prediction is completely wrong for my lifestyle!
I don’t think that the errors in the history of Windows are relevant, any more than those in the history of Unix (Linux, for example, is not technically Unix).
But I think it’s interesting to view unix package managers like “apt” as sort of proto- app stores, and I can say that I have made decisions about an operating systems worth based on the quality of the repository and the implementation of ye package manager.
I think JLG hits the nail on the head that what we might now call the “underlying os” is irrelevant. Sun seems to have seen this long ago, but executed so poorly on cross-platform client side Java – while failing to spot the app store opportunity – that they probably set the industry back 10 years. (I speak as a java developer)
One thing is clear: most people struggle on with MS-Windows and have no idea what they are missing, unless they also have a smartphone. I use Win 7 at work. It’s better than XP– you can go all day without rebooting. But, it’s nothing I’d want to rely on; nothing I’d ever BUY.
I do not understand the point? There is UNIX and Windows and they have a history of development wrapped inside of marketing and sales. Now we have them on phones and sell applications online that run databases in the cloud.
Where is the conclusion or prediction or unified field theory that this leads up to? This is a long introduction with no middle or end.
Interesting except … apps. Someone I Follow on Twitter today switched to Linux and did a blog post about. But what happens, I asked, when he needs to use an app that isn’t available for Linux, such as for Kindle eBooks or iTunes?
Visual Studio is the new OS.
Remember when windows was _finally_ able to change IPs without a mandatory reboot? It was because Microsoft borrowed the TCP stack from the open-source BSD Unix project.
I have been dual-booting Ubuntu Linux 10.10 Beta since it launched … alongside Windows 7 SP1 Beta. Although the stated improvements and changes in 10.10 (as opposed to 10.04) seem minor, they have subtly been embracing and improving support for more hardware while making the GUI more user friendly. I can’t help but think Google is part of this somewhere (prior to the launch of Chrome OS). Daily improvements to Ubuntu’s build led to the RC1 launch days ago as it heads for a stable release on the 10th. On the other hand, I never expected Microsoft to get as near perfectly ‘plug n play’ as Windows 7 is. It is the ultimate non-techie operating system. They finally seem to have thought of almost everything in one nicely done package
Not to nitpick more than absolutely necessary, but there are two slight things that get me.
1) Linux is not UNIX, it is unix-like. They both meet or exceed the POSIX standard, so it works out pretty well, but Linux does not have a true unix ancestor. (It was developed on minix, but does not contain any minix code.)
2) Mac OS X is not a unix derivative, it is a certified UNIX. So, it IS UNIX.
Slightly off topic – One of the reasons why UNIX and like systems have been so resilient to change, and at the same time so robust is powerful is because of their architecture as a set of loosely coupled system. Monolithic systems are always bound to crumble at some point of time when maintenance costs overshoot the benefits. Essentially, the problem with monolithic systems is that the more you enhance it the worse it eventually becomes.
As you said, already the OS doesn’t matter now, but soon it will really not matter anymore, cause there will be one right and consistent way to build the OS.
I think you missed an opportunity here to make the point that the Windows NT kernel was strongly influenced by UNIX. So maybe you’ll think it is a stretch, but I think you can really argue that “UNIX won” without any equivocation regarding Windows.
This is a poorly focused, badly written, technically innacurate, and deeply misguided article. Typical work that an OS guy (me) would expect from an application guy (Mr. Gassee).
The OS still matters — A LOT.
The PROOF of this is that vendors abandon old operating systems, adopt new ones, and change existing ones and INNOVATE. If life were truly defined by available application-level services this wouldn’t be true.
The amount of power consumption of your netbook, tablet, or phone is DEFINED by the operating system. How well, and how quickly, your instrument of choice responds to your touch commands is DEFINED by the operating system (and the device drivers therein). The hardware features AVAILABLE for applications to use are defined by the operating system.
If the OS doesn’t matter, try booting your netbook from the cloud some time. Right. You can’t. Or try to run “Unix” on your iPad. Right. It doesn’t run Unix, or Linux… the device, Mr. Gassee, is in the details.
Don’t confuse multiple implementations having a common progenitor with “doesn’t matter” — if it DIDN’T matter we’d all be running Mach, or BSD, or some other common OS code. But we’re not. And it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Clue up, Mr. Gassee…
As one commenter has already pointed out, NT, Vista and Win 7 are not based on DOS, even a little bit – they are based on the same core principles as DEC VMS… and the VMS/Unix wars are by no means settled.
Some _true_ facts:
QNX is not Unix:
http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.3.0SP3/neutrino/sys_arch/intro.html
…though it’s POSIX-compliant, but so is Windows NT.
Neither Linux or Minix are Unix because they inherit nothing.
Mac OS X inherits from *BSD and Solaris inherits from System V.3/4, and thus are Unix.
Bonus: Android is no longer “real” Linux, because it’s tweaked and stripped down by Google into their own build tree.
Unix hasn’t won.. maybe POXIS has. NT has alot of market share and will probably gain some more with slates/pads, and CE will probably gain some more with WP7 and maybe with slates/pads.
Weird article. High growth in a new segment does not automatically make it larger than the old segment. PCs running Windows absolutely dwarfs Smartphones. Call it a plateau, but it’s a damn lucrative plateau worth hundreds of billions!
What makes smart phone devices attractive is that there is no established dominant player, at least insofar as they have the choke-hold that Windows has. Just as Apple’s iPhone seemed to be establishing that level of dominance, Google’s Android comes in and takes its place. It will be interesting if Windows Phone 7 (another reboot, but built on the same CE core as its predecessor) can take dominance. I don’t think it can, at least not yet, as it’s so far from feature complete compared to Android. But it will be the best smart phone gaming system, by far. Sort of interesting to see that from stuffy business-oriented MS.
Anyway, at the rate of hardware growth in the smartphone market we are seeing, how long before the first desktop OS sees its precense on one? It won’t be the same UI layer due to form factor, but wouldn’t that be interesting to see the convergence? And we know who owns the desktop… So has Unix really won anything?
Also, I think the Blame Vista trope is getting tired. The RTM had some bugs. None of them I found, and I’ve dealt with a LOT of them, were that much trouble. Since SP1, it’s as rock solid as 7.
Some Guy: I think the point is that, although the OS can be well implemented or poorly implemented and given that a poorly implemented OS can detract from the user experience, the innovations have all been done. All the things that are attracting consumers nowadays are being done at the application level. The OS feature set is now essentially fixed and has coalesced around the UNIX world view, and consumers don’t think twice about buying an iPhone, a Kindle and a commodity PC and expecting them all to work in a way they understand and to work together.
It’s an interesting fact to assert because we’re only a decade away from both of the big consumer-facing commercial entities going through a major OS transition and one of them being written off because it doesn’t ship the same OS as the other.
So… I want a decent application server to deploy me Web app on. Is it going to be Unix-based (JSF/JSP)? Or is going to be .NET-based? I do not consider ancient languages like PHP
Can you point to any J2EE free/cheep Web hoster? Or should I continue to go with one of hundred available .NET alternatives?
And why is it so, that you wouldn’t obviously find many Unix-based J2EE hosting? (And do not point to PHP… I do not like programming in assembler either – was fun in 80-th though)
You forgot the other OS, not windows but the ever strong OS line that powers mainframes, they are far from being last of the line, besides, most of the things we take for granted in what UNIX brings us were invented in the mainframe OS, things like virtual machines and SQL. Forget windows, it only drives x86(x64) these days, Unix drives all the other stuff apart from mainframe core stuff, yes one can run Linux on a large iron IBM but mostly in a virtual machine under z/OS.
Unix/Linux is NOT the user experience. -nix platforms have a stable and firm foundation to build the next-gen interfaces.
Interface development is done nicely by Windows and Mac. Credit must be given to Windows for its ability to withstand an onslaught of -nix devices.
ha ha , in your dreams baby
of course it matters , see Windows 94% market share vs Linux 1% then you will know it.
If your entire world is based on the Web, then you are right.
Most back end applications in the real world run on an IBM platform, and that puppy goes back to the 60s and 50s.
IBM puts a unix-y shell on it, but it is only a very thin veneer.
Windows rulez because there is no single coherent thing about *NIX.
Whole Windows architecture top-to-bottom is well planned and though-out.
Proof:
Windows’ market share: 91 %
”One Ring to Rule them All”, Bill-wannabes. And it has Windows logo on it.
As Alan pointed out (too quietly) there is another OS tradtion (or family if you like) that predates Windows, and Unix. It was initially called just OS, although there was a DOS and TOS (tape) that managed large-scale resources and developed concepts that both of the other contenders could improve themselves by implementing. The concept of a virtual machine was pioneered there, but almost the reverse of today’s VMs. It delivered an virtual image of the base hardware to each guest instance, and the operating system executed on top of this hypervisor. The original OS offered compatibility thorough its many generations (since the early 1960s) to the extent that programs written for the earliest versions still run today, as originally compiled. In that time the speed and capacity of all of its bits and pieces have grown dramatically. New programs can take advantage of new capabilities (or not). The install base may shrink and grow a bit from time to time, but the financial impact of the programs that run on this OS far overshadow what the other two produce together. It is now called, variously, MVS or zOS. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.
saying Windows isn’t Unix.Isn’t completely true cause they bought IBM OS which was a Unix operating system and added parts of it to Windows.Also if your a Linux user you’ll notice a lot of feature on Windows 7 has been on Linux a while like the window preview when you roll over the icon on the taskbar;Applets on the desktop;and others. The only feature I’ve seen on it that is new.Is the feature that sizes the windows automatically. Everything else has been on Linux awhile and now windows is saying it was their idea.
Agree with Some Guy. The OS does matter. Its a bit like saying that the combustion engine doesn’t matter. It does matter today as they have to become more efficient as oil deposits decrease and prices increase. At the same time, people are working on different engine technologies such as electric motors. The OS is a key component of a computer and is ignored at peril and both Apple and Microsoft understand this.
Agree with Phil re: package manager. Unless someone knows different, on iOS an App cannot find out what other Apps are in the application space. If so, why is this developer friendly. The iOS is restricted in so many ways because of its close integration with the App Store. My bet is that Windows Phone 7 will be more open than iOS which will be ironic.
The article misses a key point, IMHO, though it brushes on it at the end: what makes/breaks a “platform” isn’t the kernel, but the app-OS interface–the “API” that makes an app compatible or incompatible with the specific “distro”.
That OSX is built on Unix is unimportant to Linux users, other than they now know their way around the Terminal app for administration purposes. My Mac apps don’t run unaltered on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and never will. My iPad apps don’t run unaltered on my Mac OSX instance, either.
Apps make a platform, not the kernel. This simple fact, from a software developers perspective, means that the OS *does* matter, though the OS I choose must have the best market-feature combination for the app I want to sell.
James Urquhart
CNET | The Wisdom of Clouds
LOL! Back to the old Linux/Unix vs. Windows argument again! SSDD!
-Max
Jean-Louis,
While Linux is at the heart of most devices these days, it is not the OS anymore. The OS has changed its face and definition and now provides a larger set of services. Just look at Android and what is required from developers to use it: it’s a whole application framework you need to deal with, it provides an application store with a different development paradigm, a way to send and publish Intents – objects that can be communicated easily across different applications, etc.
The OS became the most important thing again. Simply because it is changing drastically.
Tsahi
The “app store” was already around for years before Apple even dream about it. And all its applications were free… I am talking about the package repositories that many Linux distributions have. Specially Debian, who was the first to provide dependency checking (IIRC).
For years I told my friends how apt was the best thing in the world, and used to joke that you just have to “apt-get something” to fix any problem of your life. That still is the number one advantage of using Linux instead of Windows. Who can argue that Windows could benefit from a more centralized software source?… Back in the early 90s it was very common to have missing DLLs in your system, and installing a new big program can still be a headache.
Years later apt and other package systems for Linux came along, the iphone “there’s an app for that” joke became mainstream. But before “there is an app for that” you already could “apt-get install” it. I mean, at least if you have debian-multimedia unstable in your sources.list…
If only FLOSS people were more concerned with marketing.
With vitalization it may not matter what the core OS is when you can pick and choose from many. At home I used both Windows 7, and Mac OS X and each have a vitalized versions of both on each. I can run Windows 7 applications with no problem on my Mac and I can run Mac applications on my Windows system. Although I would prefer the *nix based operating systems due to the fact it seems not to have as many crashes, or require patch, after patch, after patch to fix. And on rare occasions have to reboot each time. I like both Windows and *nix based operating systems, but something new will come along and replace both in time. Now if the game developers would write more on OS X I would switch in a heartbeat =). In the mean time I will just launch my VM layer and continue forward.
Codexena
More hype from a Unix bigot. (If this were a Windows blog and written from a Windows perspective I would be calling you a Windows bigot.) I worked in the data processing/computer field all my career – 40+ years. One thing I learned is that people use and love what they know and hate and disparage everything else. You are a prime example of exactly that thinking. Use what you know and love but don’t try and make yourself look important and knowledgeable by putting down other software.
I am a tinkerer when it comes to programming and for that I have my old computer running whatever distro of linux I like at the moment. For everything else, my top of the line pc is running Vista. Can’t say I have ever had a single problem doing what I need to do on it. It runs CS4 for work related stuff and plays every single game I want to play. Other than surfing the web, about 15% of my online time, nothing I currently enjoy or do for work can be done on even the best tablet PC. I really love when people talk about the cloud and the death of windows. Its primarily fluff wrapped in dreams until the backbone of our internet services can supply not only myself, but the millions of companies out there enough bandwidth to maintain the same level of efficiency we do at the moment. The OS doesn’t matter if your grandma wants to check on her Farm on a facebook app, but for most serious businesses OS absolutely matters.
Try telling the multi billion dollar games industry that the OS doesn’t matter. I understand that most new growth in that sector is among people playing games through their browser, but that in no way negates the immense amount of money still going out to pay for services and products that usually only work on Windows. Yes, for the rest of the world that has just come around to discovering the internet, the limited ability of all these devices is enticing and provides for their basic wants. Trying to imply that somehow big business is ever going to be comfortable changing every byte of data over to the next hot thing is ridiculous. I also don’t see too many new businesses, for the foreseeable future, deciding to wing it by using a system that does not have the support network available to them that windows does. When I worked at Home Depot, their entire system worked off of an old DOS shell that was written decades ago and only updated as needed. The fact that every single store would have to be offline while everything was updated, (meaning no sales and no new customer contacts could be entered), means they are never going to do this. We’re talking about one of the largest companies in America that is going to be using windows and the pc’s that os powers for as long as its profitable to do so.
It’s not the operating systems, it’s the qualifty of the software you want to run on it, that makes the difference. Given first rate software, any of the familiar names are great – without that, none of them are worth much.
Well, I believe that the story is there and that one key aspeck been left out is the fact that there is another aspect that will forever change the landscape of computing at the server level, hypervisors. Is in it’s infancy, hypervisors will go form an hw > hypervisor (hardware abstract layer) > OS > APP and moslikely move to a hw > hypervisor {OS API abstract layer} > APP. This will clearly make the OS irrelevant and if you consider that the hypervisor could even do like Apple did moving from RISC to CISCO, do native hw translation, it could enable a means to further protect your investment in business APPs mitigating the conern of hw compatibility for longter investment in APPs.
That is the Holy Grail and I believe that it will come in the following form, a simple hypervirson originally to consolidate all the Linux versions, providing not only a forward looking single API framework but also a simplified means of management, which has tremendous cost impact in the IT budget. This will follow further development adding new API like Unixes and even Windows if it is still around. This could also mean that it could be the way to further maintain legacy apps in the could without the OS management overhead.
As to bets on how this will happen, I look at it in the simplistic of rational, who is to losse most from current trends? And two companies come to mind, MSFT and Intel, thus I predict that these two will joint forces and begin this interesting path into new commuting…. They key here ia that they will be driven by this model as soon as Oracle buys AMD, who’s APP are the key driver behind most of Enterprise APP space and could forever change things once they begin on the road to cupeled solutions (the entire stack as Lary likes ro call it.)
It might sound radical the the OS purist, it might sound ludicrous to the personal pc user, but in the server market, we’ve seen what virtualization has done, but all this is actualy created is an increased in cost on the OPEX of the OS management, and soon someone with the funds who understands that there is tremendous market outhter will move and attempt to mitigate that problem, moving to my predictions or somewhere thereabouts ;^{|
My favorite line is “THIS is today’s OS. User experience. Development tools.” I think at some point in the future, we’re going to see new apps commonly purchased at online stores as source, and compiled on the consumer’s computer. Perhaps that might take place sometime after ARM netbooks and tablets start appearing, when the CPU landscape becomes more diverse; and a generic app store experience will be one in which the buyer’s OS reports the OS and processor details, the store downloads the app source and a list of required libraries, and then the OS compiles the app and finds whatever libraries it needs. Sounds like a marriage between Steve Jobs and Debian. (uh oh… that’s three people named there… bigamy… or as Groucho said, “that’s big ‘o me, too).”
Linux is fun!
i wake everyday put on my corporate clothing and i get into my executive Audi drive to my plush corner office where i develop .NET applications on my Windows 7 OS.
After work i go home to my Ubuntu OS where i develop web based applications using Ruby on Rails.
because I’ve always had a passion of coding therefore working on windows has been ok. I just got into Linux recently (3 months) after many years of procrastinating and i must say I’m really enjoying it.
or tho i think Microsoft should see Linux as an OS that will revolutionize how we use OSes in the future. they should team up with Linux and create the best OS that will assist all mankind. time to work together i think!
Nice article. I think you missed a few aspects though: http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2010/10/perhaps-we-need-to-blame-apple-for-making-computers-and-devices-so-easy-to-use-that-we-no-longer-think-about-the-os-or-maybe.html
google
MAgic!
“Today, there’s only one operating system: Unix. (Okay, there are two, but we’ll get to that.) ”
Ummm no, not really, VMS and a few others are still very much alive, being used where real stability is needed or for specific need scenarios.
And to group BSD, LINUX and the various UNIX flavours under one banner is to say a porsche and a beatle and a ford are all the same…
I do agree though, LINUX/UNIX is the way to go
100% agree to this!
As a long-time reader from my days at Dynamac, I think any future app store discussion needs to include an analysis of how the MPEG-LA patents fit into the app store.
Jobs negotiated for months to license these patents, which were once considered to be the key to protecting rights holders. As the notion of a paywall becomes more nuanced, the role of an OS migrates from being an island unto itself and instead assumes a gatekeeper stance, managing an increasingly vibrant dynamic between buyers and sellers of digital goods.
As a long-time reader from my days at Dynamac, I think any future app store discussion needs to include an analysis of how the MPEG-LA patents fit into the app store.
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