“It is becoming increasingly clear that we are heading for a world in which there are only two operating systems Windows and Linux. Within 10 years virtually all computers, from the smallest wristwatch (don’t laugh) to the largest mainframe (they will never die), will run one of these two operating systems. All others are headed for extinction.” Maybe true, maybe not. Get the rest of the story at It.MyCareer.
Operating Systems Dwindle Towards a Big Two
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I realy do not think that Apple will go defunct any time soon. they have a large community that can support them, they have good income and nothing that MS or Linux can produce will ever pull a mac-er away. OS X is getting better also, and it id the main reason I am switching to Apple. I do think that they need to close the gaps in their product line however, like give us an iMac in a Tower and give us a g4 Tower for around $1299.
True, MacOS X is not destond to run our infrastructure, or a wrist watch, but it will continue to be used on the desktop for a long time.
“Apple – proudly going out of business for over 20 years”?
Sounds like the author of that article is thinking only in the server business – on the desktop, I see lots of Macs around here.
I think that if they had a chance of doing so it would have been in the middle 90’s. hell, if Jobs did not think he could realy do anything to help the company then he would have sold neXT to them and gone and give full attention to Pixar. Just because they use PPC rather than the horrid x86 does not mean they are idiocyncratic. also, look at what the company has done in the 4 years that Jobs has been back:
created the iMac, brought Style to computing created the iPod, created the best Unix ever, started marketing again, and they now have the best selling PC (the iMac) hell, Apple is actualy making money in this slump. that has always been their strength, they can generate hype and excitment about a new product and the reason they can is because they can make products that deliver.
before Jobs return look where Apple were headed:
they had blah desktop boxes, they had very incompatable interfaces, they had little software, they had a hard time communicating with other computers, they were slow, and they crashed…..Apple was going down
I think that if apple markets OS X well enough, they can get better penitration in the family PC market. I mean hell, a PC is a PC to these people, they don’t care if it is x86 or PPC under the hood, they just want value, good looks, ease of use and connectivity.
I love OS X, and it is the reason why I came back to the Macintosh after a hiatus since the early 90’s. They are definately on the fast track back, but OS X still needs more polish. The only reason my family uses it is because I’m the one who runs all the computers. My sister, her boyfriend and my boyfriend all really don’t like it all that much. They don’t like computers, and they don’t like how things aren’t arranged exactly where they are expecting them to be. They like they way it looks, but they aren’t so wowed by it that it wins them over. Case in point, both my boyfriend and my sister’s boyfriend are looking at buying computers for the first time, and neither wants to get a Macintosh. I don’t push the issue yet, because I know that the OS needs some more work, even though it is very impressive.
The author’s conclusion that Microsoft is unbeatable is simply not true. They are successful because they are innovated, not technologically necessarily, and they don’t drop their guard. They do “cheat” a bit, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere in the forum, but that isn’t the only reason for their success. In ten years I don’t think you’ll see the demise of OS X, Solaris, Linux or Windows. I further think that the mainframe and supercomputer OS’s will always be around too, but they of course are a small fraction of the market, as they always will be.
If they don’t like computers, then why do they have an OS preference? my brother doesn’t like computers and he will use whatever you give him, just tell him where the programs he needs are and he is ready to go…..and how is IE, Mail, iTunes etc not in a place they expect them? they are on the frigen dock!!
are you using 10.1.1 or 10.0? I suggest an upgrade to 10.1 for $20 then DL the 10.1.1 upgrade with the update tool. it is much cleaner and much better…..also, tell them that XP is even less user friendly and perhaps buy an iPod for your sister for christmas so she has a motivation to use the Mac
>:-)
Yeah, sure whatever… As someone else said about Apple “Proudly going out of business for over 20 years,” there are TONS of Macs in the world… I can’t read a design job ad without reading the ignorant HR line “candidates will have proficiency in MAC.” Stupid HR people don’t even know what a Mac is, let alone how to type it next to all the other mindless acronyms they see… There will be Macs for some time to come…whether I like it or not.
In the embedded world, QNX has a huge following, as do other proprietary OSes (e.g., VxWorks, pSos, etc.). Linux’s lack of licensing costs may attract some OEMs, but there is also a lot to be said for the less chaotic platforms provided by the established embedded OS vendors. And OEMs are wary enough of Microsoft that WinCE will never extinguish its competitors the way Windows has in the desktop market.
“created the best unix ever”
hahaha…. you are an apple
hahaha….. OSX is not more unix than BeOS is… (with BeOS being 10 times faster..)
Solaris, linux etc ARE unices, not OSX. Having bash & gnu tools doesn’t mean it’s an unix operating system.
BTW, I’ve to admit that OSX is way better than OS9 (haha) so MacUsers must be happy in their little funky world..
first, OSX could kill M$ in one year if Job decide to port it to PC. This is the apple wild card.
2 OS only is for a static world. Don’t think that we will continue to see the PC architecture in 10 year. Current FPGA price are so low that an architecture boost like in the 80’s is very possible. You can even buy a suface mount kit and do your own board for the price of a home theater.
Current PC mania came in early 90’s when manufacturer started to specialise into specific hardware. Now they regret it a lot because when a competitor come at your door it’s like if a company would make all in the same day 1000 identical product to your 1000 diversified company product.
The computer world ecology is no different from earth ecology. When to few species exist, the ecosystem fall. The best exemple of this is the VG crash of the 80’s. Then you have the weak DNA that come when breeding too much releated individu, that mean that without moving idea and feature from OS to OS, the OS will perish for not being able to keep up. An exemple of this is the paper. I use paper to organise my idea 1000 time more than computer because computer can keep up with how fast my brain think, paper can.
1. I’m running 10.1, downloading 10.1.1 over a 56K modem takes awhile, and haven’t had time yet.
2. Every time I upgrade the OS, through PB, the doc icons disappear for applications like iTunes et cetera. Since each user has their own account, I would have to log in as them and rearrange everything every time. I don’t think so.
3. There is more to “not knowing where things are” than where applications go. For example, when they save a document in Word under classic, it saves it to the “Desktop”, only sometimes it isn’t their OS X desktop, but in some other place. The overall feel makes things harder (not impossible) to find either. Which they find disconcerting.
The use my Mac all they want, but they are getting computers for their own home. I’m not going to tell them which one to buy, since that is their decision, but I let them know I would pick a Mac. The fact is they won’t.
Those that suggest Apple can kill Microsoft by porting to PC may have a point. Their sales would definately go up. Their profits however will drop, and they would soon go out of business. Apple’s bread and butter is hardware. They will therefore not be able to write OS X for PC’s and cannibalize their bottom line. They tried it with the clones, and they nearly went bankrupt.
They will get more market share if the improve direct confrontational marketing a bit more, and if they finish tweaking OS X. They will never make up the majority of the market, but if the establish a bigger beach head, no one will care either way.
The OS race/war is not going to win with one person left standing. There will always be alternate platforms and alternate operating systems. Once they all work together, few will notice the difference.
the author did not reflect on the eclectic nature of the open source development community. Of course we must consider the source. I am not familar with that Website: IT.career.com. Why should I believe what this guy says. He might be highly paid (or his company might) to go on about how Microsoft is master of the universe. They are a strong company using their position to gain more market$hare.
He did not mention any of the BSD’s, the linux kernel, GNU, FSF, BEOS… not even Novell, or the nature of a hacker. The above acronyms are many of the separate OS developments going on currently. He is strongly underestimating (probably because he has never heard of it) the tradition & power of the BSD’s, the legacy to the Berkeley Extensions. That networking software is part of every modern day operating system: all versions of BSD (including Mac OSX), Windows (all versions from WIN95), the linux kernel, etc… The hacker likes to know how stuff works & get involved in its creation. One has that ability with open source software, not just linux/GNU.
Apple has a good chance of keeping niche market with the roll-out of OSX. They keep making great hardware packages to contain their OSes. Their latest OS is rock solid. Good luck to Apple. As long as they make money, they are in the market.
Sun has a reputation for rock solid network computing. The OS is very stable as a Web server, database server, & as file server.
FreeBSD (openBSD & NETBSD) has a stronghold in many Corporate environments as a firewall, web-proxy, dns, Web-server.
GRAEME PHILIPSON is inaccurate in his analysis. He doesn’t understand the marketplace & I assume that he never worked directly in IT as a technician. He sounds like a an IT manager who looks at a lot of marketing materials (CMP magazines), but doesn’t know what works & who is using it & _why_.
I credit linux for introducing me to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, & NetBSD.
> OSX is not more unix than BeOS is…
Yes it is. Does BeOS have mmap()? Is BeOS multiuser-capable? OS X does not appear like a ‘classic’ Unix at all, but it shares source with the *BSD series and is fully POSIX compliant – in contrast to BeOS.
Well, esp when the 8bits were alive, ahh they were the days, you could go into a shop and see computer games for hunderds of completly different computers…
[DeskTop]
We currently not only have a wealth of “promising” new OSes (e.g. AtheOS, OpenBeOS, etc) but AltOSes are also stealing some of the limelight from MS/Apple which will mean (hopefully) a more “acceptive” audiance to alternatives.
[Servers]
While MS & Linux are moving in leaps and bounds in this market, others(*BSD for example) are trickling in. Plus I think it’ll be some time before MS or Linux can take the place of a Solaris (or other big UNIX vender), more due to hardware than software, and then why install lovlyPowerfullComputer-linux when Solaris is pre-installed?
[Embeded]
He COMPLETELY forgot about this in his artical. I really don’t see Nokia (or many phone manerfactures for that matter) moving to WinCE, when most own a stake in EPOC.
Then as the some one above said, you have QNX,…
Tip of the day: Read linked artical in bath of salt.
I thought OSX is a version of HURD, which is a “unix”.
I think you confuse HURD with Mach.
The day I see MS on an IBM Mainframe I QUIT!!!!
You are of course aware that MS had a 50/50 share in a unixOS for a long time before they created NT aren’t you hms
There will always be a core group of enlightened individuals who will not accept the … mediocrity (?)… that’s shoveled at them (especially when it’s shoveled by monopolists). Of course, the alternatives that *we* choose will never be mainstream — that’s kinda’ by definition. And that’s ok by me.
The day Apple starts selling OS/X for PC hardware is the day Microsoft cancels Microsoft Office for the Mac.
Microsoft has Apple by the balls and Apple knows it; hence OS/X will be PPC only for the forseeable future.
Don’t forget AmigaDOS. I’ve been using an Amiga for 15 years now & I understand completely how the OS works. I can’t say
the same for Linux or Winows 98. Both of them scatter essential files willy-nilly around in the hard disk directories (& there are
myriads of them). You almost need a Doctorate in directory structure to know how to fix small problems in Linux or Windoze.
Amiga Inc. is getting set to (finally!) release software that will run on stock Intel chips. Life will once more get interesting in
the PC world.
Yes, simplicity, well taken point. There are several levels to the topic imo of future of OSes.
As for Windows, I don’t care – it will be dominant regardless of its quality, that seems to be reality for years already.
As for Linux, I can see it’s role more on servers, or home-hub/server kind of machines, providing networking infrastructure to various end-user devices.
Now let’s come to QNX – it is very well established OS in embedded area. How’s that it is not present on desktops? I think that such example only leads to question – OS dominat for what? – desktop, handhelds, electronics, hmm?
ppl will care more of content exchange, than OS itself. The role of OS will fade imo, it will serve as underlying network infrastructure to upper layers as Rebol, Java, Tao, etc.
As for AmigaOS – yes, I still miss simplicity with today OSes. When Amigans moved to QNX, the most criticised thing was its Unixish face of file-system.
-pekr-
…well only when I get carried away with myself. Hmmm… seems to be alot of that going around. OK, only with the “I convinced myself that I am right, and here is why” croud. As for me I would like to start by saying “My opinion is” that I doubt that we will see only a two OS future. We cannot even see everything happenning in the present, so what makes people beleive the next guy or gal can see the future? Hey it is fun to banter about such things though. I just hope I can find the happy medium between taking myself serious enough to have an opinion but not so serious that I blindfold my mind. Err… well enough personal insight. I would like to see a future with an OS along the lines of the now out of production BeOS. In my opinion it was the best OS to date and will be for some time. I will speak what I would like to happen and say I think we will see a future with a few choices like BeOS. For info on Be check out http://www.benews.com
> I think you confuse HURD with Mach.
That happens late at night…
Dam night work, no wait, it means I don’t have to wake up monday morning.
BeOS has a CASE SENSITIVE file system.
OS X has one too…UFS. Feel free to use it if HFS+ doesn’t suit you.
I agree with many of the above comments. It’s gonna be “between” LINUX and Mac OS X, and the division will be mostly along hardware lines– X86’ers vs PPC’ers. Learn UNIX now! Except I doubt their will be any a**hole thieves like Bill Gates inside the LINUX community who live to crush and undermine all competitors. It will be more live and let live. LINUX will start to fade when it becomes obvious that Intel and AMD can’t deliver anymore– when the PPC performance advantage gets beyond rough parity and moves to clear RISC advantage. With sleepy Motorola at the helm, that could take a while….
But in any event, I see Windows pricing itself out of existance. Sure the hardware is a LITTLE cheaper than Mac hardware (except for notebooks), but for everything else Windows users pay thru the nose. Office is no bargain; subscriptions to “.net” and software licenses are not going to be bargains. And what do you get? A really third rate OS! My W2000 box isa way less stable than my OS 9Mac even though Ballmer and friends “claim” W2000 has memory protection. What a joke!
I personally don’t see Mac OS going anywhere and as long as Apple is selling computers there will be Mac OS!
>>The day Apple starts selling OS/X for PC hardware is the day Microsoft cancels Microsoft Office for the Mac. Microsoft has Apple by the balls and Apple knows it; hence OS/X will be PPC only for the forseeable future.<<
Actually they have each other by the balls… Microsoft doesn’t want Apple to become a software company building for x86 and/or other (they’re scared of real competition) and Apple doesn’t Microsoft to take Multimedia so seriously and Apple would like a piece of that office productivity market as well, this is where MS Office comes in. If you haven’t noticed, these 2 seem to dance around the others targeted markets, it’s really funny if you ask me!
if that means that it will not get better or more popular then I think you are wrong. if that means that it will stay on PPC then I think you are correct.
also…….
I realy think that Jobs is trying to get his prices down while still making a profit cause if he can do that then apple can move in on PC territory. they already have the Laptop market where it needs to be for a good competitive war ( the iBook is damn cheap!! show me a $1200 laptop wintel) but they need to make a lowend tower and close the price gap between the G4 tower and the iMac (hack $300 off the lowend G4–heck put a G4 in a tower with iMac hardware)
that will make them highly competitive with Gateway and Dell. then send out cataloges, get some more damn stores open!!! get on the shelf at best buy and then market market market. throw in incentives for people to buy your computers. make deals with OEM monitor makers so you can give those away with each system ( the days of headless PC priced for sale are over)
if they move agressivly they can probably make about another 10-15% market penitration from there they can begin to move higher and start demanding things like games first run and such which would further move them.
Tom Barta: Sure the hardware is a LITTLE cheaper than Mac hardware (except for notebooks), but for everything else Windows users pay thru the nose. Office is no bargain; subscriptions to “.net” and software licenses are not going to be bargains. And what do you get? A really third rate OS! My W2000 box isa way less stable than my OS 9Mac even though Ballmer and friends “claim” W2000 has memory protection. What a joke!
—————————–
The hardware is a LOT cheaper than Apple hardware [http://www.pcinfinity.net/specials/specials/SIM-2-1127.htm“>PC ] [<a href=”http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/42/…]. Even for Notebooks (see below).
Office may not be a bargain, but it is used by most Mac users. If you have a more stable OS 9 box than Win2K then you have 2 problems:
1) You don’t use your OS 9 box for anything taxing, and probably don’t have much installed on it.
2) You have got bad drivers on your Win2K box (or bad hardware). Win2K is MUCH more stable that any version of MacOS <=v9. It is a fully multithreaded multitasking operating system; and had you studied the architecture of the os, you would know that. Win2K is very much like Unix at it’s core. OS 9 is not. The memory protection in Win2K is based on application privalige. NO application ever has permission to write outside its own memory space. Drivers cause OS crashes, because they run as a part of the OS, and can write over whatever the hell they want. If you have bad drivers, your system will be a lemon. Do not confuse this with an OS failure. The OS provider did not supply you with those drivers.
If you want a system that is guaranteed to be stable running Win2K, try what Microsoft uses internally: http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/segtopic_prec_330_kat_prec.htm…
They’ll even sell it to you with Linux, if that’s what you want.
——————————-
Jeremy: ( the iBook is damn cheap!! show me a $1200 laptop wintel)
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http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/fx/index.shtml“>Sony
http://athome.compaq.com/default.asp?ProductLineId=440&page=familie…
http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/CategoryDisplay?cgrfn…
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/series_inspn_notebooks.htm“…
BeOS isn’t “as Unix” as OS X because BeOS shares no code with any Unix and was never intended to be Unix-like at all; if you know your Be history, you’ll remmeber that there wasn’t originally even an intention to have any Posix compliance, and it was added (ironically enough) by a Be employee who came from Next. At any rate, complaining about BeOS not being Unix enough is kind of like complaining about MacOS System 7 not being close enough to the TRS-80’s LDOS operating system. (Hey, they both follow the same end-of-line convention, and BinHex was adopted from an old TRS-80 file transfer program, so they must be related, right?)
Incidentally, Pete, I’m still not 100% convinced that a case-sensitive file system is a good thing.
I kind of like Windows NT’s “case aware” approach, where the case you give a file when you name it sticks, but you can refer to it without worrying about case.
you are compairing OS 9 to 2k…..try OS X.1.1 that is WWWAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY more stable than 2K.
and how can you compair a 900Mhz celerystick to a G3 600Mhz? unless you think that Mhz is the only thing that makes a proc fast.
> Jeremy: ( the iBook is damn cheap!! show me a $1200 laptop wintel)
> ——————————
> Sony VAIO
> Compaq Presario
> IBM ThinkPad
> Dell Inspiron
OK, which one of these is so silent that you can hardly hear it and runs 5 hrs on one battery? Then we can agree that Apple and Wintel notebooks are about equal in price.
I never said I didn’t like Apples, and I never said that PC hardware is better (though Apple PCI is flawed, not compliant with the PCI standard). I am a big fan of Apple and their machines. I was just responding to obviously false comments about Apples. BTW: not including CPU perf, which is a holy war with proof on both sides available all over the Internet, the Sony laptops are very similar to the Apple laptops, and offer more in the arena of slim devices.
That said, I would rather own a Titanium Powerbook than any other laptop on the planet. Personally, I believe that a 997Mhz G4 is on the order of twice as fast as a P4 1.5, but of course I can’t prove that.
The reason I cited OS 9 vs. W2000 is that I have not installed OS X yet. I am enthused about X, but I am awaiting a few more native apps before I take the plunge. My comments on W2000 stand. If you get better results with YOUR W2000 box– thank your lucky stars.
Having used OS X and very little OS 9, and a lot of W2000, I can say the shoe is on the other foot. OS 9 is thoroughly annoying and doing the most basic tasks are a pain. Why can’t I browse the internet while a file is copying and another program is processing some data? Just doing one thing ground the whole system to a halt.
That’s the funny thing about all those OS 9 vs OS X benchmarks. It may take an extra 20% of processing time to get something done, but you don’t have to *wait* for it anymore.
As far as OS X vs. W2K, I find their speed issues are about comparable. Disk I/O makes both grind to a halt for some reason. Internet Explorer is just as slow and bad on W2K as on OS X, the difference is you can start more than one IE process easily through the GUI on W2K but not on OS X.
talking about apps grinding the sysytem to a halt, I can’t wait until stuffit makes a cocca based expander rather than the carbonized one. you run it and can not do anything. appleworks 6.2 with the carbon upgrade (free) is great. it is only 14 megs and a singel executable binary. it runs so much faster to.
It is easy to generalize around benchmarks and percieved speed, but the bottom line is that SPEED differences between applications in different OS’s is often determined more by how well 3rd party developers have multithreaded their apps than anything else. I usually have a bunch of processes running at any one time, and don’t seem to have too much trouble with that.
Having said that, I think it would be fair to say that multithreading on Mac OS sucked before about OS 8. But then, it also sucked in win95.
In any event, I expect OS X will be fun, once I make my switch, though I hear it is a RAM hog.
In any event, I expect OS X will be fun, once I make my switch, though I hear it is a RAM hog.
At a guess, this is why http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/974/wo/EYoHv0zH… is doubling all the memory in there boxes for free at the moment… (so £250 pounds for 1.5G from apple. Which makes it just a little over priced with a 1Gb DIMM at dabs for £152.40
Mlk, wants £3,006.02 for a TiBook and iPod.
NOTE: This might be a little unfar, I am looking at the price for memory in the TiBook vs standard “168Pin DIMM PC133 SDRAM ECC”.
woops, 250 is for the update to 1Gb, not 2Gb as I first though…
The traditional Apple Mac users are used to waiting. They don’t perceive their Mac as being capable of doing more than one thing, and they don’t try to use it that way. Indeed a lot of the Mac UI is geared to “single tasking” in this fashion.
Neal Stephenson’s book has a funny story about this (in which early Macs prove incapable of simultaneously being on a network AND displaying a menu), and while things had got a lot better by OS 9, it is true that only MacOS X (still not the default OS in 2001) really introduces Mac users to the idea that they should expect, or even DEMAND not to wait for the OS or applications, but instead just get on with their work regardless of what the machine is doing.
Windows users have had this luxury (is it? hardly!) for half a decade, and very few Unix users even remember the time when this wasn’t the way you used Unix. Just as multi-level undo was once believed unnecessary by Photoshop users and is now part of their way of life, in five years you won’t know that Mac users were ever deprived of proper multi-tasking. They will come to rely on it.
BFS is a new and revolutionary file system, HFS+ and UFS are not. I’m sorry but Apple gets no kudos from me. I dislike Apple very much and am not buying their bullshit. Of course my reasons are mostly political, from Apple’s dirtbag sales reps to their impetuous CEO. They’re all assholes. But hey, if you don’t have the patience to wait for something better, that’s your problem. Sucka. I pity the fool that messes with Apple and/or Microsoft.
Neither of those are dominated by Windows or Linux and probably won’t be.
Well Ian, no one really cares about big enterprise servers or embedded systems. When was the last time anyone saw any of those… 🙂
Yeah except that embeded systems already have tons of OSs…..the ones with lots of functions use OS/2, Embeded NT/XP, Linux. the midrange devices use windows CE, Linux, QNX and custom. the small devices (usualy stuff that needs real time and totaly bulletproff like the ABS in cars) is Custom…..and I am sure a few general OSs but they are used in sort of higher level small embeded devices like that cool GPS/PDA thing in the Lexus >:-)
I am a electronic musician and have often looked for the one application that does everything – in truth there’s no such thing.
The problem with Windows is it does everything!(or at least tries to!!) the reality is you cant – for me the musician I use BeOS – I got it on a 200MMX machine and it flies!!!!. Windows cant cope – and I aint got the patience for Linux – people arent computer scientists so will find it hard to appreciate it!!
Its the old sayin but this time: “Nobody gets fired for using Microsoft”.