Is there still room for another OS to hit it big?

Post Reply New Topic

Hey!
Do you think there is enough room for another OS to come and crush all the others?
Probably not imo.
What do you think?

Windows
OSX (Unix)
Linux (Unix)
BSD (Unix)
Solaris (Guess what? Unix again)
VMS (Not Unix, but who uses it????)
BeOS( Late, lamented. holy F**K that OS was fast, but there were no real apps for/ported to it)

I really don't think so.

Unlikely

I'd say it is extremely likely given enough time as new technology and hardware comes along. In fifty years time I very much doubt we'll be running Microsoft Windows 37 or Linux Ubuntu pink furry squirrel 9000.

In 100 years time the current operating systems will be as obsolete as the "hardwired" operating systems in valve based computers.

No I think you find that operating systems as we know it will evolve into terminal type apps that connect to the cloud

i think the boundaries of software will beign to fade with more emphasis on small isolated but interconectable (in a standardized way) pieces of code.

we are already seeing much of it in win 8 for all its faults and shortcomings, done right the concept would be absolutely amazing, doing away with the traditional concept of an OS alltogether.

Yes.

Technology is constantly evolving. AndroidOS is becoming more popular all the time as more and more people buy and use smartphones. Ditto iOS.

And beyond that, people are always inventing new things, sometimes for entirely new technologies (tablets, smartphones) and sometimes because the existing tech wasn't actually as good as it could have been after all.

The movement is more and more towards web applications and data stored "in the cloud" with clustering, massive parallelism and redundancy, distributed computing, a seamless interface between local and network, etc. supporting a range of applications and form factors from server farms down to tablets and smartphones.

See influences like:

• Plan 9
• Inferno
• NeXTStep (went into the Mac OS X)
• BeOS
• Chrome OS
• Android
• iOS

Making an OS is a huge project and is by no means something to be taken lightly. The platforms we have focus on making sure we can develop just about anything we want in software quickly and easily, so finding a competitive edge will be difficult.

These days, if you want to do something really different and be better you have to come up with new hardware.

I think there is absolutely room for another OS to rise up and murder everyone. There are still enough outstanding annoyances with all of the major OSes that something really well executed could still take off. Of course, something that well executed would have to be designed by aspies.

Google had some interesting ideas with Chrome OS and Native Client that I believe will eventually form the model for future OSes. I'm not too keen on their idea of everything being on the cloud though - I think everything *can* be on the cloud, but you need a local mirror.

Personally, I would be on the lookout for something that balances the easy, modular configuration from *nix, the rigid standards from iOS and the software cohesion Windows tries so hard to achieve.

As for compatibility and dependency issues, I wonder if an OS has an API-accessible DVCS on dynamic libraries instead of keeping copies of every version.

I'm also for tag-based navigation/virtual directory trees for large file sets.

...Yeah, I'm sure there's a niche to be filled here.

Question is, when will the niche become profitable enough for companies to chase?

I don't think the issue is that it wouldn't be profitable enough so much as that for a software development project the financial outlay would be enormous and the risk would be extremely high. Most venture capitalists don't like to invest in lottery tickets.

For something like this to truly succeed, it would have to be backward compatible with Windows applications if not also drivers, WINE is a halfassed layer and VMWare still has too much overhead. The decreasing cost of virtualization may make this a non issue in the future though.

The right team could take the Linux kernel and build it out into something like what you or I would envision, but it would cost at least tens of millions.

open source and indie developers are already kicking the butts of billion dollar industries, i dont see why that is going to change.

UNIX is the future. I personally think that Google will release a full Linux based desktop OS at some point and kill Windows with it, but we shall see.

Either way, what we must remember is that our current operating systems have only been around for, what, a decade or two? Within the next decade everything will change, that's how technology is.

The issue with indie open source developers is that they consistently fail to provide the type of polished end user experience you would get from, say, the iPhone. Producing something like that is actually incredibly taxing, especially in areas other than actual coding where open source developers are very weak. That's why proprietary products tend to beat free alternatives at the end user level, the exception being Android. Even Android provides a clearly inferior end user experience to iOS, and Google has invested significantly in it.

For servers and hobbyists, Linux tends to be the order of the day, but the gap between Linux and Windows has been shrinking slowly but consistently since the mid 90s, and for many purposes the gap isn't really there anymore.

Even Apple has failed to deliver the kind of end user experience I'm talking about on Mac OS. They pulled it off with iOS.

I'd say Ubuntu is quite polished these days. Of course all the geeks hate Unity but it's made the OS very easy to use for normal punters.

Lion and Mountain Lion are quite polished OSes. I hate that TBH. They're dumbing it down too much.