I’ve been studying Windows 2000 for a while now, and I’ve noticed that Microsoft has adopted (or stolen, borrowed, whatever) technologies from almost every other operating system – Active Directory from Novell, Plug & Play from Windows 9x, TCP/IP and DNS from Unix, etc. The merits of Microsofts strategy can be argued – that’s not what I’m really interested in. I think everyone can agree that Microsoft is a very powerful company, and other companies will need to keep up with this trend. So is it fair to say that in 5 or 10 years there will be only one OS and networking technology? What will the effect of that be on the computer market?
Well, at $300 a pop for Windows 2000 Pro (not even considering the huge cost of 2000 Server and client licensing for network environments) you can bet Microsoft isn’t going to own the market in 5 to 10 years.
Open source O/S’ (Linux, Free BSD, etc.) are already seriously eating into Uncle Bill’s market share on the desktop and (especially) server level, BeOS is a very young O/S with a lot of potential, MacOS isn’t dying anytime soon, and while many believe that Novell is dying, it just has too big of an installed base to die anytime soon.
In short, I think it’s nearly impossible to believe that the world will ever be able to agree on a single O/S, much less within the next 10 years. Then again, show me someone who can predict the state of computers in 10 years, and I’ll show you a liar, a fool, or both.
I would never entrust the entire world’s computing to a single OS.
Hold on here. Look at networking protocols – there was once a time that everyone used their own thing - NetBeui, IPX, Appletalk, TCP/IP. Now everyone is using TCP/IP. Including Microsoft. Same thing for Directory Services. LDAP is used by all. So who’s to say that all platforms won’t be compatible in the future? Isn’t that the direction we’re heading in now? Even in the battle between Linux and Microsoft we see convergence. Each are starting to be able to use each others products, and I didn’t even mention Java.
Curwin, I’m not sure I know what your question is. Are you talking about having “true” (i.e. governed by some group similar to the IEEE) industry standards or having a single operating system?
I don’t think networking protocols and OSes can be compared. An OS is more complicated, both technology-wise and as a product of its company. Besides, I’m sure those other protocols are still in use in some capacity.
OSes may be compatible in the future, but not in the 5-10 year timeframe you proposed. For one thing, there are too many OSes for that to happen. The Mac OS and Windows have co-existed for roughly 15 years; how much compatibility is there between the two now? None. Neither is there much meshing between Windows and UNIX, or the Mac and UNIX. Making two OSes compatible is never priority for their respective developers, and will never be as long as there is competition between them.
IMHO, there’s a heck of a difference between adhering to the same standards and running the same OS.
Microsoft has the market for desktops & laptops, sure enough. I believe they haven’t taken over the server market because servers are run by people with priorities different from those of the desktop users. A server admin focuses less on ease of use and more on reliability, affordability and performance, and MS doesn’t compete all that well in these areas - or so it seems, at least.
Higher on the food chain, there’s a lot of platforms that MS doesn’t cover and probably never will - Sun, Silicon Graphics, Cray and of course the good old dinosaur mainframes (IBM, Siemens/Nixdorf etc.). While there aren’t many of these machines around, compared to the number of Windows/Intel PCs, these are the machines for serious real-life computing - bookkeeping, banking, large DBs, powerful webservers, satellite trajectory calculations etc.
So no, we’re not going to run under the same OS. The requirements for what we want to do with our computers are way too different for one OS to handle.
S. Norman
Good point. While IBM has been embedding their AIX version of UNIX in their systems for ten years or so, most of those beasts are still running VSE (under VM or alone) or MVS.
How soon will they be gone? For four or five of the last five years, IBM has sold more mainframes than in any preceding year in history. (I.e., each year beat the preceding record-breaking year.) Amdahl and the other IBM clones haven’t been losing any sales, either. There are tons of applications that still use them, including new ones. (I’m working on a system that is placing a web front-end on an older DL/I database. Why? Because the database is more than adequate to the task, so the expense of re-writing the whole system in Oracle or Sybase simply garners no benefit, while putting an internet front door on the thing does allow better user control than the original pure CICS, 3270 entry screens.)