You say in 5 years the only oses of importance will be some version of Windows, Linux, and IBM's "z/OS".
What is z/OS? As far as I know, IBM has OS/2, AIX, MVS and various wacky mainframe oses. Do they still have that Series 1 or whatever they called it?
It's clear that most or all of the unix variants will almost be dead in 5 years. It will be great to have just one (or a few). I'm sure windows will be there. MacOS will probably be hanging on. I'm sure that MVS will be in lots of mainframes still.
A more interesting question is will a new os, not listed above or known to me, have any serious market share (say 5%). I just don't see Apple's rewarmed NeXTStep (aka OS X), as much as I would like NeXTStep to survive into the future, to make any real impact. It is amusing to see that a lot of the things that drives people crazy about microsoft happening to Apple (no support for some dvds, beta late, missing functionality, whole product years late, requires lots more CPU and memory than the old os )) Writing software is hard, and will be for the forseable future (= the next 5 years) ?
It could be that finally they make embedded devices useful enough to sell (I'm not thinking of a phone, but of some kind of small terminal with keyboard, or maybe voice recog.).
-nick |
