Operating Systems Wars Enter New Phase

It’s interesting how seemingly unrelated things sometimes occur in such close proximity that you can’t help noticing their underlying relationship.

In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a number of events related to operating systems, a topic I don’t usually spend a great deal of time on (although I confess to a continuing fascination with the market’s increasing passion for Linux).

Let me see if I can list them out and then try to relate them for you.

It’s hard to figure out how much of that is Linux – IDC estimates that about 27% of all servers use Linux but that includes desktops used as servers and existing servers repurposed by their owners with free or purchased Linux software.  (Gartner argues the number is much lower, probably in the area of 6 to 8 %.)

What does all this mean?

Operating Systems Are Becoming Less Relevant

Today it’s becoming less important what operating system is running on your device (desktop, handheld, whatever) and more important that you be able to easily run a standard browser.  This is because the most frequently used applications are email and web access, not personal productivity applications that are operating system dependent.

Also, developers are often writing not to an operating system API, but rather to an application platform (a web server perhaps, important application like Office, SAP, etc., etc.) or a development environment like web services, e.g., .NET or J2EE.

With handheld devices, operating systems are even less relevant.  This year, analysts believe devices with embedded operating systems (handhelds, telephones, cars, intelligent refrigerators, and personal medical equipment) will exceed personal computers with traditional operating systems.  Most people neither know nor care what the operating system on their phone is; in fact, very few people even know phones have operating systems.

While embedded versions of Windows have been more successful recently, generally other products, optimized for small devices, such as embedded Linux, PalmOS, Symbian, and Wind River have been the operating systems of choice for these environments.  In these small environments, small footprint and appropriate performance have so far outweighed being able to match desktop operating systems and access existing applications and developer communities.

If Sun, which has long argued its superiority in offering a single operating system, Solaris/Unix, “from a less than $1,000 system to a $10 Million system,” can see the need to provide a broader Linux offering, we think the market is speaking, demanding more choices.  We believe that IBM’s commitment to offering Linux across its entire product line, and the interest of other hardware vendors in providing Linux choices helped to create an environment in which this became an obvious move. 

It is too soon to see if this point of view will prevail.  Customers don’t buy operating systems per se, but rather solutions that provide robust environments and access to lots of software and development skills.  If Linux can offer that, it may create a place for itself in the enterprise market.  If it doesn’t, that will be because it failed to pass the ultimate test – provide useful, reliable function to customers at appropriate prices.

New Kinds Of Operating Systems May Become Important

On the other hand, we may want (and need) new kinds of help in managing increasingly complex computing systems. 

Sun’s N1, which is a kind of operating system to provide integration of diverse systems elements for a network-based, distributed computing environment, knowledge of their state, and control management seems, in some sense, like a modern version of a mainframe operating system.  That is, it performs some of the same tasks, but it performs them in a very distributed environment and it may ultimately be able to integrate not only Sun’s components – servers, storage, and software – but also heterogeneous components from other vendors. 

At the same time, IBM is exploring the idea of e-Liza, a series of hardware and software improvements to its servers and software which will allow systems to be self-diagnostic and self-managing (sound familiar?).  Even more ambitious is their Autonomic Computing project http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic which will try to make increasingly complex systems simpler by treating the entire computing environment as if it were a human body, with the autonomic (or automatic) nervous system making adjustments to the environment and managing the system. 

Such advanced meta-operating systems may, in the final analysis be much more interesting and important than the operating systems of today since they will buffer both users and systems operators from the complexity of the computer and its transactions and tasks and simply permit them to USE the computing environment without the need to learn arcane commands or rules.  That couldn’t happen soon enough!

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