Seven client OSes that won't replace Windows

"PCs will be outpaced by mobile and Web devices. Arguably, they already are." Outnumbered, yes - at least they already are in Japan. Of course I'm talking about a country that has massively faster broadband connections and more people in remote areas that are still serviced than anything available in North America. Many of those people are also too poor to own a computer, but a half-decent phone with email access is still affordable. Outpaced? Hardly. Until broadband connections can achieve better performance than local hardware, that'll never happen. Sorry. Don't hold your breath either....

Isn't OS X largely based on FreeBSD? Seems like OS X could have been left off and been included with with FreeBSD...

The comments on the original "article" (really, it's a slide show to push ad impressions) are the best part. Somehow, it's actually turned into a debate about OS/2 including "history lessons" taught by people most likely too you to have even seen OS/2 and who spend their time correcting each other's folklore with competing conspiracy theories.

Seven thyngse that shall never replace the horse: 1. The Auto-Mobile 2. The Aero-Plane 3. The Steam-Ship 4. The Loco-Motive 5. The Tele-Graph 6. The Wire-Less 7. The Tele-Phone Why, three of the aforementioned items are not even conveyances! Seriously y'all, this Windows Über Alles stuff seems a little myopic, if not whistling past the graveyard. Windows Forever will eventually seem as anachronistic as OS/360 Forever, VMS Forever and Apple ][ Forever.

lehenbauer It would be nice if your analogy were even close to reality but instead what we have in the article is What will replace the horse? An old burro wearing bunny ears An old burro wearing a straw hat An old burro An old burro wearing a Groucho Marx moustache A story about a unicorn Who cares about horses, we can have dog carts Who cares about horses, you can walk

Or, to follow up on the "seriously, y'all" comment... OS/360 had innovative competitors VMS had innovative competitors The Apple ][ had innovative competitors See a pattern? See the problem with extending that to Windows when the only competitors are ALL based on even older design architectures? Microsoft should be an easy target. They have a huge legacy and backward compatibility cost. They're supporting everything from UMPCs to Supercomputing Clusters with one OS architecture. They have corporate customers and an industry press that's change averse and lobbies them to not innovate. But everybody else is less innovative. Seriously, this discussion (and the one on the original slide show) quickly devolve into nostalgia for alternate operating systems but both BeOS and OS/2 were dead by the late 1990s. Both of them did their innovation over a decade ago. And everybody else gave up on developing an Operating System and just slapped stuff on top of ancient tech rather than actually creating something new. It's really just sad.

lotsa OK. That's just a really silly post. Care to try again and show us where this "innovation" exists that's being "stifled"?

Mike, First, an "older design architecture" is not much of a criticism. Unix was designed at Bell Labs and refined at Berkeley. I'd rather have that than the latest Redmond hack any day. Those were real computer scientists out to make something solid, and the Unix foundation of OS X is one of its best attributes. As for stifling innovation, Microsoft has been convicted of this and fined for it MULTIPLE times. Litigation in the EU is still pending. Apart from the fact that Windows (in any flavor) is just utterly clunky, the thing I'll never get past is what this industry could have been without the millstone of Windows hanging around our necks.

A little history lesson to correct some implied folklore: Steve Jobs didn't decide that Unix was a good choice during his first stint at Apple. Unix was available for the Motorolla 68000 processor but Apple decided that they needed to innovate. When Steve Jobs started NeXT, it was to compete in the high profit margin Workstation market targeting universities. The two leading competitors were SUN and Apollo who used BSD Unix since Universities already had free source code Unix licenses so to compete there was no choice but to use BSD. While Jobs was away from Apple, they didn't decide Unix was good either. They tried multiple times to create a modern operating system during that era. Pink failed. Gershwin failed. Copland failed. Then they decided that when they no longer had the ability to write their own operating system, rather than go to Unix, they partnered with Big Brother himself, IBM, to jointly write a modern operating system called Taligent. It failed. With all these disasters, Apple decided they weren't capable, even with help, of writing an operating system and decided to buy one. They looked at BeOS and NeXTstep. With one they got new technology. With the other they got Steve Jobs. They picked Jobs. Was that the right choice? That's certainly a topic that's been debated ever since. Was any of it because they loved Unix? Nah.

I still have faith in appliances. MS has worked in this area. Surface is somewhat related as coffee table will become your computer and home entertainment center, as well as take care of home automation [X10 and INSTEON for example]. You will surf the web, watch TV with the LCD or PDP of choice, changing channels or loading movies using Surface or something like it. You will dim the lights, adjust the HVAC temp with it, and you'll use it for gaming. You'll make doctor's visit appointments or chech your own health care records.You'll finish work at home, online banking,etc...

Wow Mike. Do you sit in front of this page all day and hit F5? Twenty one comments to this post. Eight of the longest are yours. Bravo sir.

mike, did you know that BeOS is still being used in a professional audio recording workstation called RADAR? They're manufactured by IZ audio, in Canada, I believe. I have no idea why they use BeOS, but they do.

gorath I didn't know that. There are people updating the Amiga OS and people updating OS/2 so somebody still using BeOS in a niche market isn't at all surprising.

Meanwhile, in the real world of products and customers, Apple blow past everyone and their nearest competition (Dell) in customer satisfaction by 10 points. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&... Why replace Windows when you can make a profit, grow in healthy double digits and keep customers happier than ever competitor? Let Windows keep it's dominance. Nobody cares.

john Yes. We heard. Both users were happy.

@Mike, Very funny. Glib and wrong. But a joke I'm sure they love in Redmond. @Waethorn, Well, considering that Harry McCracken and others have demonstrated that Apple's are priced comparably to comparably equipped PCs from Dell and HP and generally cheaper than Sony... I don't think your lamborgini reference is reasonable or proportional. If you want to do the car comparison, you really should say that Apple is the Honda or Toyota of car makers. But the car comparison is obviously flawed for plenty of reasons. As for mac users not knowing better, Paul himself has said he believes Mac users are generally more tech savvy since they aren't going with the default choice of the majority, but making a choice to use a different platform. I agree with Paul on that, which invalidates your point. Face it. You just can't handle that Apple's products deliver a better user experience. Even Steve Balmer agrees that for the narrower target of uses (consumers, education and selection of niches) the Mac's user experience is superior. That Balmer can recognize this and you can't is very telling.

John Glad you thought it was funny. Were you really expecting a serious response to hijacking a thread? Especially hijacking a thread by insulting the actual on topic discussion? Really?

fireboy92K It's worth noting that there have been desktop and server versions of the Windows NT operating system family from the time Windows NT 3.1 was released in 1993 through today's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. From 1988 through 1995 Apple did offer A/UX for servers and the totally unrelated Systems 6 and 7 for desktops, It wasn't until five years later that Apple offered a desktop OS that even had memory management or preemptive multitasking.

Yawn! A few corrections and clarifications... There were many non-Unix preemptive multitasking systems (besides OS/360) prior to the Amiga including most time sharing mainframe systems in the 1960s and 1970s. The original version of BASIC by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth in 1964 included preemptive multitasking. By the time Unix came out, preemptive multitasking was considered an essential for an operating system except for specialized small systems that were dedicated to single users. What the Amiga did was do preemptive mutitasking on a personal computer. Of course, it wasn't alone in that either since IBM's TopView and Microsoft's Windows 1.0 both preemptively multitasked MS-DOS applications in 1985 but it did do it in a GUI and excelled by its use of dedicated secondary processors for multimedia. (As a side note, the IBM PC in 1981 supported an optional 8087 floating point math coprocessor but did not support the 8089 I/O coprocessor) All versions of Windows have had a preemptive multitasker for MS-DOS apps (You can't cooperatively multitask an app that wasn't written to explicitly release control the way Win16 apps or Mac Apps do). What got added starting in Windows/386 2.10 was support for 386 virtual mode which did process isolation in hardware which wasn't supported by the 8086 or 80286. Configuration of preemptive multitasking of MS-DOS applications was part of the settings in the Program Information File (.PIF) which existed for each MS-DOS executable run on early Windows. Microsoft/IBM OS|2 1.0 had preemptive multitasking for Windows console Apps in 1987 and Windows GUI apps with OS|2 1.1 in 1988. OS|2 1.0 also introduced the "thread" version of lightweight process and thus the concept of the multithreaded app (as opposed to multiprocess app) As for Microsoft and Intel killing support NT support acrosss other platforms, that's not only wrong but bizarre. Microsoft went to a LOT of work to make sure that Windows NT was portable. In fact, Windows NT was intentionally built on other platforms and ported to Intel x86 to make sure that no x86isms snuck in from developer habit. (First i860 then MIPS R3000) Windows NT was developed for MIPS R3000/R4000, DEC Alpha (32-bit and later 64-bit), Fairchild (later Intergraph) Clipper, PowerPC (CHRP and PREP platforms - and, yes, that means it ran on Apple Macintosh reference hardware during the AIM Alliance era), SUN SPARC, Intel/HP Itanium, Intel x86, AMD/Intel X64. It was only dropped from any of those platforms when the hardware vendors gave up and often Windows NT was the last software still being actively developed for the platform.

Oh, and along with Windows and TopView there was also DESQview as a preemptive MS-DOS multitasker in 1985.

We now return you back from 1985 and the world of Unix, Amiga, GEM, Lisa, TopView, DESQview, MacOS, MS-DOS and Windows to 2008 and the world of Unix and Windows. And also return you to the original point. Nobody is innovating in operating systems except Microsoft. And that's just sad.

The age of the technology is irrelevant. It is how fit for purpose it is. Given that there has been no paradigm shift in computer architecture ( it has just got smaller and faster ) the core of Unix is as relevant now as it was 40 years ago. What is important, to a user rather than otaku, is what is the quality if what is delivered on top of that core OS. And that is where OS X is better evolved and implemented. I don't like that word "innovate" as how that is defined is way to variable e.g. Windows Vista's pricing scheme counts as innovation under the dictionary definition. However if people are happy with Windows all power to them. It's not what you use but what you create that really matters.

"Was that the right choice? That's certainly a topic that's been debated ever since. " By whom? Honest to God, did you THINK before you typed that sentence?

@Mike - Again, you are accusing somebody else of hijacking a thread, when in fact it is you that hijacks every thread on Paul site. I find it sad that you feel the need to comandeer Paul's site as your own and talk down to the entire audience. You are stubborn in your beliefs, and are as bad of a spokesman for MS as Lindy is for Apple. You should really look in the mirror and ask yourself, "Why do I feel superior to anyone who dares question what I say?" Oh, and maybe concentrate on innovating, instead of spending 14 hours a day on Paul's site bitching about Apple. --tayme

"Nobody is innovating in operating systems except Microsoft. And that's just sad." "And the result of their "innovation" is Vista and Windows Mobile?" Let's look at the competition shall we? iPhwn $3G? MobileFlop, anyone? Oh yes, sad indeed!