Today's FT IT review carried a comment piece by the doyen of Silicon Valley tech journalists, Dan Gillmor, which - despite the clunky headline "Microsoft, Apple resume games of tag and leapfrog" - made some useful points.
The FT version is subscription-only, but Dan's made the piece available on his site.
He talks a little about the face slapping between Mac OS and Windows, and their continual arms race - referring to how different, and how similar, things were a decade ago. He also laments IBM's failure with OS/2 and says that competition between operating systems is good for the consumer.
And then he looks at some other options:
Linux? It's coming along at a surprisingly fast pace. The open source software community has ardently improved the free operating systems to the point that it's acceptable on the desktop for at least some uses. It's not yet up to the proprietary competition for use by average folks, especially home users who want to do anything beyond basic computing applications.
Another shift may be more important: the move to the web. To the extent that the web is a computing platform in its own right, the system running the individual service loses importance. We are a considerable distance from total independence of this kind, but the trend is real."
I think we could be a little closer than Dan reckons, especially if the big web operators like Google put their weight behind more web-based applications, and Flickr helps open more people's eyes about what you can do via browsers.
It's a little like what may be happening in the mobile sector (as I wrote a couple of weeks ago in a rather turgid piece (sorry!))... the operating system and the mechanisms around it become less important and the content and web-based applications start to take over.
At least that would stop everyone moaning interminably about how they hate Windows/OS X.
