 Computing  With the arrival of Windows XP and MacOS X 10.1 practically at the same time, the operating systems market is seeing a strong push for innovation from the main players in the market. How will the installed react to these new offerings? End users are getting increasingly conservative: adoption of major new operating system releases from the installed base is a very slow process. This contributes to the “balkanization” of the operating system landscape. Including Windows XP and MacOS X, there will be around ten major operating system releases in the market. This will contribute to increasing confusion in the market. |
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 The operating system landscape used to be clear-cut and simple, there was Windows, there was MacOS, and while the nerds could go on and on about the benefits of different releases, most users didn’t really care much about operating system versions: they used what came installed on their machine when they bought it, and they only upgraded when there was a strong need for it - or when they changed machines. The problem is, for a huge number of users there never was an enormous need to upgrade. Microsoft and Apple, on, the other hand came out with new releases of their systems almost every year. MacOS “Classic” is now officially at version 9.1, while Microsoft until very recently has been touting Windows ME and Windows 2000. So far, so good. But now we have innovation hitting the market. Apple is moving to the Unix-based MacOS X. Microsoft is ready to release Windows XP, the first major release of the operating system since Windows 95, which it will unleash this fall with one of the most torrential marketing campaigns ever. Considerations about the intrinsic qualities of these operating systems aside, the question which arises from this situation is of course: how will the market react to this? We are not in the 90s any more: even casual users now know what they want to use their computer for, and the vast majority of them neither has a big interest in innovation, nor is it inclined to experiment with unproven technical solutions. In other words, we are heading for the most fragmented, uncontrollable operating systems market ever. It is a patchy landscape, composed of individual users sticking with their pre-installed Windows 98 or MacOS 8.6 or 9, corporations which are still standardized on Windows 95 or NT 4 because its stable and has been approved by the IT department, companies who just moved to Windows 2000 because Microsoft has hammered them with marketing messages about the professional choice in operating systems. Add to that increasing market share for Linux in the server landscape, and you wind up with over 10 different operating system versions in the market - each one present in significant numbers. And, I’d like to add, it will be some time before Windows XP and MacOS X will be used in numbers comparable to the most popular older versions of each system. Should we care? Does this matter to us? For those just thinking about running their computers, this is actually of little importance. Most users will adopt a healthy “wait-and-see” approach, and move to the next operating system release once they know it works. But this may take much longer than the companies behind those systems like. If this migration takes too long, it may be a problem for both Apple and Microsoft. For both companies, their future depends on the adoption of the new operating system - albeit for completely different reasons. For Apple, MacOS X is the technological future of the Macintosh platform, and if migration takes too long, or is too patchy or inconsistent, the implications for software developers for MacOS can be enormous. For Microsoft, Windows XP is less important as an operating system release, but as a way of moving to a new way of doing business. Windows XP is at the heart of Microsoft's strategy for the future and its efforts to get users to pay for software services in an ongoing way. If this strategy fails, if the users are not taking to it in the numbers expected, it could mean major trouble for the company. So it looks like the future hinges more than ever on the user adoption of new technologies. The only problem is, nobody really knows how much innovation the average user wants to cope with right now… September 7, 2001
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