Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
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Rather than creating distinct mobile and desktop environments that work more seamlessly together—the Continuity features in OS X Yosemite, for example—Microsoft is building a multi-device platform. A single OS that can run flawlessly on the various devices we use.
I've been watching this process play out for some time, as the industry trend is toward convergence. In market terms, as a market matures, consolidation happens, and you wind up with a few big players and a bunch of folks in niches too small for the big boys to address.
In computers, this has played out in several areas. On the hardware level, we've seen a steady reduction in the number of architectures. While RISC chips like the SPARC and PowerPC are still in use, for the most part the choice has come down to Intel or ARM.
On the OS level, we are seeing a move to run the
same OS on any device you have. Apple approaches it with their line - desktops/laptops run OS/X, and everything else runs iOS. In future iterations, I expect to see them converge more than they have, and iOS will be Apple's
only OS.
Windows has been moving in that direction, with a flavor of NT on desktop and laptop and Windows Phone on phones. Windows 8 RT was a build of Win 8 that would run on ARM based tablets. It did not come as a surprise to me. Dave Cutler, the chief architect of NT, was insistent from the beginning that it be portable and able to be brought up on things that weren't X86 based.
Linux is moving in that direction, since Linux is designed to be portable, and you can get a Linux distro for just about any platform, but Linux has the issue of fragmentation, and so
many distros, with the only thing in common on some of them being a Linux kernel. That might just coalesce around Android, which runs on phones and tablets, and has an alpha X86 port that could become a desktop offering.
The changes discussed so far are all the
visible ones, and I'm curious to see what changes MS may make on the system level.
On that line, one of the most interesting possibilities was one MS was rumored to be working on for the development code named Longhorn, which became Vista. MS was reported to be thinking about a whole new file system, moving away from NTFS and using a model derived from SQL Server. It reminded me a bit of Pick OS, which included a relational database and programming language (Pick BASIC) as part of the core OS, not a layered product.
I'm just as happy MS
didn't do it, but it would have been fascinating if they had. It illustrates one of the trends in overall development. IBM's mainframes used a variety of file systems, and it's mainframe OS had a built in level of application awareness as a result. Unix took the opposite direction, where everything was a file, and a file was an arbitrary stream of bites. It knew about standard files, "special" files (devices), and directories. A program was simply a file with the execute bit set in the permissions mask. Whether the file
could actually be run as a program was the user's problem. Unix would let you try, and just fail with an error if it couldn't.
Windows is closer to the Unix model than the zOS model, since NTFS is now the default file system, and programs are still files, but more application and awareness and support on the OS level is still a possibility.
The bigger question as platforms converge is precisely applications. Not only do you want the OS to run on any platform, you want your applications to do so as well. This is possible to some extent now as hardware has grown steadily more powerful. The rise of cross-platform scripting languages like Java and Python has made it possible to create applications that will run on any platform that has a current version of the language runtime. The runtime hides the hardware and OS differences, and you can write and compile code on one platform and run the result on another. Current hardware is powerful enough that you
can write in something like Java or Python and get acceptable performance, instead of having to use a language the compiles to native machine code. Kovid Goyal's Calibre, written in Python, and available for Windows, Linux, and OS/X is an exampel familiar to MR readers.
MS has made a start on this, and I expect to see that effort continued as time goes on.
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Dennis