From a consumer point of view it appears that Operating Systems are becoming less and less significant. Consumers use the same services on every device or operating system and to them it is these services that are important not what they are running on. Therefore, are customers really concerned about the operating system? To a technologist, developer or IT professional this may clearly not be the case, but herein lies the divide.
Midnight launches consisted of tech fans of all ages queuing to get their hands on an operating system, something that will probably seem bizarre to the millennials of today who now have little if any interest in Windows or OSX. Today they pick up a device of their choosing and expect it to work without feeling the need to know what goes on under the hood or the exact version of the OS. I wonder if is this really such a bad thing after all? As an example, I wrote this article on my 15 inch Macbook Pro at home and until a couple weeks back when I read somewhere that Apple had released its new operating system OS X El Capitan, I was under the impression that I was running the latest and greatest which in my mind was OS X Mavericks, the previous version to El Capitan. And truth be known, the upgrade has made no visible difference to my life whatsoever although I did want to upgrade because of the advertised security improvements in El Capitan over its predecessors.
Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to remain relevant to the younger generation, they ran into huge problems when research suggested that 6-12-year-olds were much more interested in iPads than a Microsoft Surface. IT departments letting down their infamous guard to allow BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) quickly ensured that iPads frequented boardrooms across the globe, but Apple’s Achilles heel was the reluctance to support Active Directory which has usually been IT’s preferred method of group policy.
However, it is not all about the Enterpise vertical. Additionally, education is a highly profitable industry. Although Google’s Chromebook and cloud storage provided the search engine giant with a fantastic opportunity to establish itself in the educational sector, Microsoft Office continues to dominate education for general audiences. In the digital age, the battleground is shackling users to an ecosystem of their choosing. Users both young and old simply do not care about the intricate details about operating systems and the reality is that the majority cannot even be bothered to upgrade to that latest version for a few add-ons that they won’t probably even use. Naturally, developers and producers need to create apps and software for all major ecosystems, so this shouldn’t stop them from building apps and software for all three major operating systems. The fan boy arguments of Windows vs. Due to our heavy reliance on the web browser, topics like Android versus iPhone or OS X are now completely irrelevant. Even though there isn’t as much software for Mac, it still attracts users because it gives them more freedom. On the contrary, Windows offers a more controlled environment but equally a much more versatile system for consumers of all levels of expertise.
Arguments about which platform is best are ultimately pointless because they are purely subjective. It seems we have spent far too much time arguing or judging people on what option they choose, but ultimately we all use the same services on every device or OS.