Why New OSes Don't Catch On

mopslik writes "OSNews has an interesting editorial discussing why smaller operating systems will have a hard time gaining popularity. Familiarity, developer participation, and market saturation are listed as reasons for failure. Although the article focuses mainly on Syllable and SkyOS, I'm sure there are countless other operating systems to which these arguments apply."

Comments

Gates owns the grid.

[Baldrson]

Microsoft's operating system is in demand not because of its high quality but because the information industry's infrastructure must use it as a standard means of communication.

This seems higly analogous to the situation where you have one electrical standard for interoperation of devices and power generators.

Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.

Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates of laissez-faire capitalism [wikipedia.org], as Milton Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.

Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.

He can't recover his character by giving away all his wealth to fashionable causes -- he's not much of a rock star anyway. He might try getting something like a replacement of income and capital gains tax with a tax on net assets passed through the wealth-owned political system -- or at the very least a tax on market capitalization.

He might also fund a technology prize or two. Why do guys like Gates, Allen and Ellison leave it up to folks like the Ansari's to do the noble thing and stop schmoozing with people as a test of their worthiness for money? Are these guys that lonely?

more than ten years ago....

[3seas]

... there were those who laffed at Linux...

things change...

Re:Duh....

[timmarhy]

iuse a freebsd desktop, it's superior to windows in every way. there is one single reason people need windows - office. once office has open xml formatted documents, it's domination will end.