Michael Gartenberg has an interesting blog post today that proclaims that “operating systems don’t matter.” He makes a good argument that it is the need for particular applications that drives what systems/operating system we choose. There is a lot of logic in that theory, but I’m not sure that it is currently that easy to make the statement that operating systems don’t matter.
Gartenberg gives good examples to show how it was special applications over the years that caused him to buy particular systems to run those applications. I can appreciate that because I have done the same in the past. The key phrase there is “in the past,” because the more I think about this interesting topic the more it appears to me that it’s not individual applications that point me in a given direction toward a product but the environment in which that product runs.
Consumers today are multi-taskers. Whether you look at computer operating systems or smartphones, we all do a lot of different things with those products. We don’t just surf the web on our computers, we do that and we interact with others via email/ IM/ Facebook/ MySpace… well, you get the picture. We are no longer tied to one particular application that is only available on one given operating system, we are all over the map.
That multi-tasking has crossed over from the computer world to the smartphone domain too. We no longer just want a good phone, we want a good phone that handles all of our messaging needs: email, text messaging, IM, web-based messaging, etc. We want to surf the web on our phones while handling all our phone tasks. It’s not the one application that drives the savvy consumer, it’s the environment in which all of this happens. And that is the operating system.
I believe that’s why the Palm Pre is such a hot topic these days. It has taken the applications we want and brought them together in an environment that looks like it will present those applications in a productive way. It’s not really offering any one new application we haven’t seen before, it’s the operating system that is different.
This points to how it is the environment that is important to the consumer. I agree with Gartenberg that consumers don’t care what OS they use, but they do care very much about the environment in which they work. It’s not as clear-cut as just saying the OS doesn’t matter. It’s the environment that makes us productive doing our thing that we pursue. That’s why even at the consumer level we have to decide what OS we want a given product to use. It’s the environment we have to choose and today that means the OS.
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