DeMaris, Justin

ISKM 210 / Hopper

September 27, 2005

The Future of Desktop Operating Systems

It is an undisputed fact that the largest group of home desktop users is using Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Usage statistics gathered from web sites for September of 2005 put Windows usage at over 90% with Windows XP making up almost 70% of the total (Browser). Microsoft obviously has control of the desktop operating system market at the moment, but the circumstances that gave them their current status will be the same circumstances that topple their monopoly and make way for a competitor to take the wheel.

Many documents that make claims about operating system usage are written with a bias, and it is often up to the reader to research the author’s background to determine their slant. So before I launch into the actual argument, I feel the need to explain my own background in the area so any reader can see my bias up front and read my explanations with this bias in mind. I have two main desktop computers that I do work on: the first runs Microsoft’s Windows XP and the second runs FreeBSD 5.4. Most of my work gets done on the BSD machine, but I recognize that Windows makes my job easier sometimes, so I use it when I need to or configuring BSD to perform the task will take more time than I have. Overall, I am a proponent of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and am a fan of Linux and an even bigger fan of BSD Unix. Given this information, the reader should be aware that even though I attempt to be impartial, I do have a slant in favor of alternative desktop operating systems.

Once any one company or product has an overwhelming control of the market share for a particular niche, it is natural that they will continue to retain the position and it is up to any smaller competitors to provide a product or service attractive enough to the public to tear them away from a known standard. In order to understand why Microsoft has control of the market, it is necessary to look at the conditions before they took control and understand how they got it in the first place.

The operating system that is actually responsible for Microsoft’s success is MS-DOS, the Microsoft Disk Operating System. The first version was released in August of 1981 and there were a wide variety of versions of it, each specific to the computer manufacturer; for example, Compaq computers came with CompaqDOS, IBM computers came with PC-DOS, etc. While they were all based off of the same general program (Microsoft’s DOS), they each had unique abilities that the vendors added in. Actually, in 1988, Microsoft’s release of MS-DOS 4.0 was based on IBM’s PC-DOS 4.0 rather than the other way around (MS-DOS). Part of Microsoft’s success at this point was due to the fact that they continued to integrate the customizations that each vendor made into the main operating system as well as other non-DOS operating systems. For example, many of the commands in MS-DOS are derived from the Xenix project from their earlier foray into operating systems. Xenix was actually a Unix operating system derived from AT&T’s Unix Operating System, which was based on BSD Unix (Xenix). Other features such as memory management and an editor were copied from Digital Research’s DR-DOS (MS-DOS). Microsoft released the first version of Windows in 1985 in response to Apple’s Macintosh operating system, which had a graphical interface.

Microsoft’s initial success was due not only to their technology, but very largely to their business practices. For instance, when IBM released the Personal Computer (PC), there were two operating systems offered for it: CP/M, which was sold for $250 and PC-DOS, which was sold for only $40. The price difference resulted in Microsoft becoming the standard (Microsoft).

In essence, the two largest factors that lead to Microsoft gaining control of the market are the fact that they absorbed technology and innovations from many different sources into their one centralized operating systems. Eventually they even forced the other vendors to simply call all of their products MS-DOS. The second strongest tactic they used was to make sure their products hit the market cheaper than their competitors by a significant amount. Microsoft had the distinct advantage of really having only one competitor in the home desktop environment because the market was just beginning; that competitor was Apple, and Microsoft made sure to implement the features that Apple put in its projects, namely a GUI (Graphical User Interface). This is what gave them the lead they still have.

The second part in predicting the future of desktop operating system is to understand the market today and to see what tactics Microsoft’s current competitors are using. Microsoft today has two major competitors, although together they only take up less than 7% of the market share (Browser). These competitors are the Linux operating system (based on Linus Torvald’s Unix-like kernel), and Mac OS, by Apple.

The impressive thing about Apple is that they have survived the entirety of Microsoft’s dominance of the market and are now making a market share come back with usage almost doubling (1.8% to 3.2%) in the past 2 years alone (Browser). Probably the single most significant factor in Apple’s come back is their most recent operating system line: Mac OS X (X representing 10) or simply OS X for short. This most recent operating system is actually based on the BSD Unix kernel, which means that security is a central focus of the Operating System from the very core (OSXFAQ). What this means to the end user is that they do not have to worry about the viruses, spyware and popup adware problems that plague many Windows users. They also provide a fast, intuitive, and visually appealing interface that makes the learning curve virtually non existent. A second important change that has improved Apple’s standing in the OS community is that they lowered the price of their machines and the operating system itself: the latest Windows version retails for $200 for the home version or $300 for the professional version when it hits stores while the latest version of OS X is only $129 (Apple). Apple has taken the two tactics that Microsoft used to get the market to begin taking part of their market share away: they are implementing ideas from many other sources, namely the open source BSD community and providing their software at a significantly lower price.

The other competitor that is gaining ground on Microsoft is the Linux community. While there are many different versions of Linux, they are all based on the same kernel and are relatively similar. The Linux community right now is very similar to Microsoft’s DOS community before it was all unified under the name of MS-DOS. One of Linux’ strongest advantages is that anybody in the world can make any changes to it that they want and submit it to the community for other people to use. This means that while Microsoft and Apple have both use ideas and code from many different sources to improve their operating systems, Linux has the advantage of being able to get ideas from a much wider base of sources. Linux also has both other operating systems beat in the second category of price: Linux is free for anyone to download and use. So why has Linux not taken control of the market already? The main reason is usability. Since the majority of Linux users are technically savvy and programmers themselves, they often have problems designing software for non-technical users. According to web statistics, Linux is currently about even with Mac OS in the usage scale (Linux has 3.3% while Mac OS has 3.2%), but they are growing more slowly than Mac (Browser).

So what is the prediction for the future of desktop operating system usage? At the current rate of growth, Mac OS is going to break ahead of Linux, and because of their business strategies they will most likely continue to grow for quite some time. But at the same time, while support for Linux may be growing more slowly right now, the fact that it is growing is significant. As it continues to gain more users a larger group of people will be putting work into it, which means that it should pick up its growth at an exponential rate. In the long run, unless Microsoft improves its strategies Linux is going to gain a large amount of its market share. Mac OS is based on a similar kernel as Linux and it has a very creative design team behind it, so it to will gain a very significant portion of Microsoft’s market share, but the fact that there is still a price attached to it will hold it back.

Works Cited

“Browser Statistics”. W3Schools. 15 October 2005. W3Schools. 27 October 2005. <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>.

“MS-DOS”. Wikipedia. 25 October 2005. Wikipedia.org. 27 October 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_DOS>.

“Xenix.history”. 2005. Unix Guru Universe. 27 October 2005. <http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?I=xenix.history&F=1111111111&G=Y>.

“Microsoft”. Wikipedia. 27 October 2005. Wikipedia.org. 27 October 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft>.

“Microsoft Windows”. Wikipedia. 27 October 2005. Wikipedia.org. 27 October 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows>.

OSXFAQ. OS X FAQ. 2005. Inside Mac Media, Inc. 27 October 2005. <http://www.osxfaq.com/Press/07-23-02/stos-07-23-02.ws>.

“Apple – Mac OS X”. Apple.com. 2005. Apple Computer, Inc. 27 October 2005. <http://www.apple.com/macosx/>.

The Future of Desktop Operating Systems

Justin DeMaris

2005-11-01T19:58:00

WhiteHatUSA