What's the Future of Operating Systems?
We'll make one prediction: However much life may imitate art, the operating system of the future will not look like the Hollywood OS (okay, see Wikipedia).
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Symbian OS
The company: Symbian Limited
Symbian produces and licenses the Symbian OS and is wholly owned by six wireless companies.
The operating system: Current version: 9.3.
Symbian OS is the leading operating system in smartphones, with 71 percent of the market and over 100,000 Symbian smartphones sold to date. Symbian smartphones outsell iPods by nearly 50 percent.
What to watch for: The distinction between a smartphone and a computer to break down. Symbian Executive Vice President for Research David Wood expects the smartphone market to expand and diversify as economies of scale turn most phones into smartphones and smartphone technology enables new devices emphasizing non-phone features like Internet access, mobile TV, navigation, and games. In addition, Wood says, "smartphones will take over functionality that currently exists in different items in our pockets or handbags, such as keys, tickets, vouchers, identify cards, credit cards, and loose change." Wood predicts that we will see more Internet access from smartphones than from PCs and "more material read from smartphones than from any other medium." |
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Microsoft Windows
The company: Microsoft
Microsoft is a software company producing operating systems and applications, and the largest company of any kind in the computer industry.
The operating system: Current version: Vista.
Microsoft Windows dominates the desktop computer operating system market, with a marketshare somewhere around 90 percent. The long-awaited Windows Vista release, probably the largest software project ever undertaken, is really a family of operating systems.
What to watch for: Microsoft doing the OSS dance.
In Vista, Microsoft needs to work with Linux and Open Source Software while aggressively competing with it, and only the latter half of that dance comes naturally to the company and its CEO. Also security: While Vista introduces a large number of new features and enhancements, drastically improved security is probably the crucial criterion on which it will be judged. But now that Vista has been released, the question arises, what's Microsoft's next desktop OS act? If one believes Gartner Research, maybe there isn't one. |
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Mac OS X
The company: Apple Computer
Apple is a computer and consumer electronics maker and does not license its operating system to any other company.
The operating system: Current version: 10.4.9. Although iPod sales and rumors of other consumer electronics devices dominate the Apple news, Apple's marketshare for Macintosh computers—and hence, for Mac OS X—shows signs of climbing: In a December poll, Investor's Business Daily found intent-to-purchase figures for Apple just shy of those of #2 PC vendor HP.
What to watch for: The switch to Intel processors to start paying off. The Intel inside every Mac may be contributing to Mac legitimacy in some markets, feeding market share growth. But it also lets Windows and Linux applications run at native speed on Apple hardware, and we have yet to see what the consequences of that may be. And Intel processors may also enable new low-power devices from Apple, possibly running a (merely rumored as I write this) consumer electronics version of OS X. (Would that be OS x?) |
