Desktop Operating Systems: A Partial Romp through the Graveyard
March 30, 2009
I was enticed by the title of this ComputerWorld article here: “Gone But Not Forgotten: 10 Operating Systems the World Left Behind” by Matt Lake. I am an old and addled goose, so the amount of detail provided for each of the 10 operating systems varies quite a bit. Mr. Lake does a good job with the highest profiles systems, less well with the older, smaller OSes. What struck me when I read the article was that none of the operating systems differed significantly under the kimono. I grant the coding was different and features available to developers varied. The significant difference was the interface. What I noticed from the screen shots was that the look and feel of the operating systems converged. Over time, the interfaces moved from the inscrutable to the explicit. My take away from the article was that the operating system has become mostly irrelevant to the user. The interface is shifting from the explicit to the anticipative. The implications of this in my opinion translate to significant market upheavals. Who will suffer? Most of the enterprise software vendors will find themselves on the wrong side of shift. Interoperability will eventually become a smart software problem. Products like Chrome, therefore, which look like a browser but are in effect software versions of space ports that connect the world of the user’s data craft with the larger universe, are important.
Stephen Arnold, March 29, 2009
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