Why New OSes Don't Catch On 350
mopslik writes "OSNews has an interesting editorial discussing why smaller operating systems will have a hard time gaining popularity. Familiarity, developer participation, and market saturation are listed as reasons for failure. Although the article focuses mainly on Syllable and SkyOS, I'm sure there are countless other operating systems to which these arguments apply."
Duh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a classic chicken and egg problem. Why would anyone other than a OS hobbyist (by definition a very small number) switch to an experimental OS? I would never switch a family member to a niche OS. When they ask me what I use at home, I may tell them about it, but even if they expressed interest would I not switch them over. The potential for unlimited phone calls is near 100%.
Linux has the luxury of time, broad acceptance over a large geek audience, and the benefit of being one of the first successful open source, collaborative endeavors. Anyone trying to jump start the same thing now is in for astronomical challenges.
Willie
Apps... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the drivers, stupid! (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting Used to (Score:3, Insightful)
--
Free Credit Report Info [mycreditreportinfo.com]
Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Syllable hasn't caught on because they haven't appeared to have done anything of note since the AtheOS developer quit and they forked it.
Hard to show a value proposition... (Score:5, Insightful)
Going off and starting a new OS seems like a silly waste of resources in most cases.
Maturity & Potential. Gen Purpose & Specia (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want develop new OS. Embedded OS is the only way to go. We evaluate them all, ALWAYS. You will NEVER change the desktop OS.
Bill, Steve, Linus and a few thousand others have it covered. But if you wanna change the device interface, go ahead, roll it up again.
I personally choose Linux for many reasons. But if NEWOS works, and fits, and is reliable, and is FREE, I'll look at it and still probably choose Linux. If the device can't take Linux it really isn't my project at this point. But, I would hand it off to another engineer, with my recommendation of the new OS.
the main reason (Score:1, Insightful)
Trying to make an OS is hard enough, trying to make it compatible for the average user is harder still, trying to do this and catch up on 25yrs of technology has got to be just about impossible.
Why don't new restaurants catch on? (Score:2, Insightful)
We'd all like to think that quality == success, but luck seems to be the real player.
Maybe it's because (Score:3, Insightful)
Serious, you could have a product 100 times better than Windows, but it would barely see the light of day because Windows is known, trusted (even if wrongly trusted), and has excellent marketing that would squelch your product.
Re:It's the drivers, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, come on.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Applications. (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at it another way: What OSs have actually managed to gain some level on general support? Windows, obviously, then OS X, Linux and *BSD, and maybe you could throw in Solaris. After that you are into rather more niche material (like AIX, HP-UX, UNICOS etc.) designed for servers and the like. What do those OSs have in common? The ability to provide a wealth of appliations - though they do it by different means:
Windows - through ubiquity and market share: everyone writes apps for Windows.
OS X - by being able to promise application developers a market: Apple has always had a fairly solid hold on the graphics and design market, and enough general use that they can convince developers to write stuff for the Mac.
Linux and BSD - By being open source, and winning the open source market share. That is Linux and BSD are ubiquitous amongst open source developers - it's the Windows of the open source world.
Solaris - Well, it's more filling the niche big server market and any ability to cling to the desktop/workstation is by co-opting open source applications, which Sun have done a decent job of.
If a new OS (or some of those radical "Let's make Linux ultra standardised and easy like OS X" ideas) comes along it has to be able to attract applications: that means support open source applications for Linux and BSD with only a recompile, or be able to promise a guaranteed decent sized market of users to any potential app developers. The latter is very hard, and the former has the diffiulty of competing with the established Linux and BSDs.
Unless someone manages something truly radical I really don't expect anything but evolutionary changes in the existing OSs from here...
Jedidiah.
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, what's great about FOSS is that I can build on an existing platform. So if there's a *piece* of the system that I don't like then I can replace it but still build on all the hard work that others have contributed. The plethora of Linux distros is great because you can start with a baseline distribution and tweak it however you want. If you can find enough other people who share your values then you can build up a nice little community without too much trouble.
Re:Duh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the large reason that Linux is taking over commercial Unixes, and with SkyOS not having this advantage I don't see what the incentive is to use it over Windows (its apparent target).
Syllable is a completely different story.
Re:It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Changing your OS changes everything about your computing environment.
"Everything" is a rather broad statement. When I switched my main machine from Windows to SuSE/KDE, most things worked in nearly identical ways. Click an icon to start a program, drag-and-drop things to folders or applications, even Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V to cut/paste works in nearly all applications. As for the applications themselves, I use OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Firefox... all of the same apps that I run on my Win2K machine at work.
Software installation was a semi-major difference, albeit an easy one to get used to. Manual hardware configuration is a bit tricky, but I rarely change components, so I only have to do it once. The rest was fairly trivial.
Re:The reason I haven't used them. (Score:5, Insightful)
This problem has been obvious every since Microsoft started dominating the desktop OS market 20+ years ago, destroying a half-dozen competing (and mostly superior) platforms in the process. Yet people continue to insist that a new OS (or an old one [wikipedia.org] with a few tweaks) can magically get past the no users/no developers/no users paradox just by virtue of being technically superior. A tribute to wishful thinking, I guess.
State support? Where? (Score:2, Insightful)
How exactly was Gates given state support? If anything, the Open Source Movement is *based* on state support. After all, most open source work is done in, or with the support of public universities, and students willing to work for free because they have time and money due of their state supported education.
What you're advocating a tax on success, and anyone who can follow basic logic understands taht this does NOT work in the long run. Hell, look today at offshore companies. Companies do it because of progressive taxation. I'd be willing to bet that the US gov't would rake in a good bit more, and inspire more innovation if not for oppressive taxes. Congratulations on your fantastic, world-changing product/service! Welcome to your new 50% tax bracket!
People will switch if you can answer this question (Score:4, Insightful)
Why did I switch from IE to Firefox? Tabbed browsing, no popups, security. Firefox gave me something that I wasn't getting right then, and I didn't give up anything I was using.
Why do I use Linux for development? To have a rock solid system with fine-grained control of my development environment, and built-in, easy to use tools to automate the tedious parts of the job, like text processing.
Why do I use Windows at home? Because no acceptable substitute exists for playing World of Warcraft, etc.
Why didn't I switch my development machine from Linux to an untried OS? I don't know, you tell me, what does your OS do better than Linux that justifies me abandoning the comfort of having a million-hacker install base I can ask questions to when the box blows up and download software from when it doesn't?
Re:Apps... (Score:2, Insightful)
Good luck trying to have changed incorporated (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone's talented enough to innovate something truly novel, wouldn't it make more sense to implement that bit within one of the currently active OS projects? If the idea's got real merit, and can be plugged into the rest of a system that everyone's using (like implementing a new scheduler -- it can be done as a patch to Linux... and if it's really better, it will get noticed and maybe put into the kernel tree).
Speaking as someone who fixed more than a dozen critical bugs in {Free,Open,Net}BSD kernel code over the last 10 years I have come to abandon both my dreams of starting my own OS and having my changes incorporated into my favorite BSD OS. The thing is that when you start fixing bugs which were introduced by some established coder who suffers from the NIH syndrome and this person starts to disrespect and ignore you, the whole community starts following suit and your patches are soon left to collect dust in the PR database. In the end it's all about ego, politics and personal arguments, if they don't like you for some reason your patches will be left out in the cold, even if they would fix some critical problems. When you come up with something innovative and discuss it on the mailing lists they will ignore you or they will argue against your propositions. Then two weeks later you see some committer who never even participated in the discussion commit code which basically implements some of those same ideas which were mocked and rejected by the community. They don't mention you in the Copyright notice, you can't get any credit and they won't commit your code to the CVS source tree. So what do you do? Fork off and start your own BSD? Maybe if you're Matt Dillon. I can't afford the overhead associated with that kind of project and I doubt I'd get more than 2 other experienced developers to join the project. I could get my main ideas implemented within 6 to 8 months, but after that I don't really have a plan for where the project should go. I'd have to play catch-up with the BSD I would use as a basis and after a while they'd incorporate some of my code, but not in the way I would like them to and my project would be dead in less than 2 years.
I have come to hate the politics and the hypocrisy in most of the open source OS communities and I have seen so many talented people quit BSD development for similar reasons that I'm so burned out I doubt I will ever submit another patch or suggestion on how to fix something. Instead I'm just going to spend more time working on the commercial projects. They don't just put food on the table, but the people I do them for also appreciate them and give me the proper respect. Sorry about ranting, I just had to get that off my chest.
Re:Duh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. The article makes the same mistake that so many Linux zealots do -- they think that people can be persuaded to switch to a new operating system that (supposedly) isn't worse than they one they already have. People will switch to something _better_, not to something that isn't worse.
Linux caught on because it was _better_ for a large number of users, who no longer had to Kermit or ZTerm or whatever it was to a minicomputer from their PC. A brand-new consumer desktop OS wouldn't have done nearly as well.
Depends on what they're doing (Score:3, Insightful)
So, I think there are cases where that is exactly what is wanted.
Then, you have the case of a purely modular OS - think Linux but where EVERYTHING is a module. There, you have the above benefits when doing specialized work but CAN generalize the system on an as-needed basis when you want to do more.
The problem of software is a bigger concern, but Linux demonstrated via the (now neglected) IBCS system that a kernel can run binaries for other OS'. It would be simple enough to make an OS core that used an IBCS-like mechanism to run non-native binaries at near-native speed. Then, you'd have no problems on the software front, as everything would be runnable.
Indeed, this direction might be easier to digest by the software industry. An OS that could run anything could run their software WITHOUT needing extra developers or expense bar some simple testing.
Re:the main reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe it's not about numbers... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think these efforts are great. I realize that everyone here probably already has a bias, but let's not forget about what motivates people - one source of motivation is passion.
If someone were to take an old junker (car) and rebuild it in his/her garage, tinkering a bit here, a bit there, eventually there might be something really worthy to show for it. Even if there isn't, so what? Perhaps the joy is in the process, and not necessarily the result.
Code on Syllable, SkyOS.
Why New OSes Often Don't Gain Marketshare (Score:3, Insightful)
Over the years there have been many great OSes that now see little use. NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, BeOS, and Plan 9 are very nice operating systems. *STEP is the direct ancestor of Mac OS X and brought a lot of new, innovative features to operating systems, such as Display Postscript (predecessor of Quartz), Interface Builder (predecessor of XCode), the dock, etc., not to mention boatloads of innovative software packages (such as Mathematica, Lotus Improv, and the entire Lighthouse Design software collection) and it showed the world how Unix for the masses should be built (which KDE and GNOME still have lots of catching up to do). BeOS has a nice infrastructure (compared to other OSes of the time like Mac OS 8/9 and Windows 9x), and is easy to use. Plan 9 is a different beast altogether compared to the other OSes that I mentioned; Plan 9 takes Unix's idea of "everything is a file" to another level; for example, the window manager supports pipes and filters just like any other traditional command line program. And all of the operating systems can run on any old 486 or Pentium.
What happened to all of these OSes? NeXT was bought by Apple (and didn't release a version of Mac OS X for commodity x86 machines, for obvious business reasons), BeOS's parent company was going through business issues and ended up being discontinued, and Plan 9 is virtually unheard of unless you're an operating systems researcher. All three failed to make a big splash for various reasons. NeXT had the software, a supportive development group and development infrastructure (especially from Lighthouse Design and the Omni Group) and (for the first few years) had the hardware, but the x86+Windows juggernauts and the steep pricing were issues too huge to overcome for a lot of people, which ultimately led to NeXT's near demise (until NeXT bought Apple for -$400 million). BeOS had a nice infrastructure, but it didn't catch on because of Windows's mass acceptance in the marketplace, lack of huge productivity applications (which is caused by a lack of interested developers), and corporate drama. Plan 9 isn't replacing *nix because most of us "geeks" are very content with our beloved Unix (no matter how flawed it is sometimes) and see no need to change, and Plan 9 doesn't have all of the applications that users need (like productivity suites, for starters).
Whether or not an operating system succeeds or not depends on user's acceptance and developer's acceptance. User's won't dump Windows/Mac OS for another OS until it is easy to use, has all of the applications that they need, comes at a reasonable price, and is compatible with whatever they used to use. Developers won't develop for a new operating system until development is relatively painless, comes at a reasonable price, doesn't require having to learn obscure programming languages and environments, and the developers feel like making their applications run on a new operating system would be beneficial to themselves.
That's what happening to SkyOS and Syllable right now. Users from Windows/Mac/*nix see no compelling reason to switch (ranging from ease of use, hackability, and avaliable applications), and developers have no compelling reason to develop applications that will attract a lot of people to the platform (such as a productivity suite). An operating system that expects to be widely used cannot go far without important applications such as productivity applications. And an operating system without a huge amount of developers developing applications for it shouldn't expect to be going anywhere.
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance the reason many people switch to FireFox or Opera vs IE is because either one does ~98% of what IE does for the average user, *plus* much more in the in your face UI area - the area users are likely to notice (The quintessential Tabs and such).
Many home users *could* switch over to Linux today, but it'd be painful. They'd lose a lot - I'd estimate about 50% functionality(Games, Hardware control programs for printers, UPS, etc), and 80% famaliariy(How installation goes, the little differences between OO.org and MS Office).
I figure for any sort of mass exodus to another OS, we'd need to get the functionality to within 95% and the familarity near 80%. That's a long way to go, towards a moving target. I have my doubts we'll ever do that.
However, there's another aspect. At some point, the hassles + price may start to tilt the balance. For instance, I really like eating at Red Lobster, and the price isn't too bad, but I almost never go there. Because of the minimum 30 minute wait, more often an hour. That kind of time will get me to try an unknown restaraunt, or even go to the Outback instead, even though it's totally different.
MS Activation already pisses off a lot of people - I'm lucky because i got a site license from my college, and don't have to deal with a lot of the crap I see posted on the net. Increased DRM, more and more security breaches, and more and more load from the "protection" software + price for them may start to make people willing to change the way they think.
Look at how hybrids are taking off in the US. If you're looking at saving $15 every fill up, many people start to take notice. And start to think, my SUV is nice, but I could be using that $60 or more a month for (Cable TV/New Shoes/New Game/Pay down loan/etc...).
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it was even more than that.
In the early days of Linux, if you wanted a decent working environment, Windows wasn't really up to snuff. A Linux machine had better multi-tasking, used a smaller memory footprint, and way better VM handling --- and if you've ever tried to use the small memory model in DOS you know the limitations of it.
I can remember running X-windows on an 8MB 486 machine. I could run LaTeX, several terminals over the same dialup session (mmmm, pr0n over 14.4K slip =), and I had a C environment that just worked. Plus xv, xfig, and a couple of other shineys.
At the time it was filling a need of making better use of the hardware and letting you get access to software. Imagine a slackware CD full of goodies when a Windows machine had barely anything on it.
This was in the Win 3.1 days, and it definitely wasn't a 'friendly' desktop, but it had more utility to it for our purposes. I remember several physicists I knew who got frustrated and switched to Linux because they could have LaTeX, gnuplot, and some numerical libraries.
For anyone starting out with Linux in that timeframe, UNIX wasn't old, it was new and way more mature.
Cheers
Re:Good luck trying to have changed incorporated (Score:1, Insightful)
Unless you work for Sun or MS who have a ton of money to waste on paying you to write code for nothing your code will always be used. Or modified and used. Otherwise its a huge waste of money. Either your not very good(maybe your friend who is telling you this isn't very good) and your employer is rejecting your code or your not part of the commercial industry.
Well, that's the WHOLE problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I've took the liberty of adding the emphasis there.
I think that's the crux of the problem, but also the most mis-understood part. That's the part that OS zealots love to mis-understand.
Let me delve into the semantics a bit, just for the sake of making a point. I'm not picking on your phrasing or anything, I'm just explaining _why_ new OSes fail, and why even Linux is of zero interest to Joe Average.
I don't think you mean literally "if the _OS_ did the same things". The OS taken by itself does actually very little, and is arguably the least important thing on a computer. The OS just loads and runs the applications, and provides some standard libraries and widgets. No more.
It's _easy_ for an OS to provide basically the same functionality of the OS itself, or close enough. Writing a loader, scheduler and some widgets is _easy_, and indeed half the games out there basically come with their own implementation of all three. Anyway, very single alternative OS so far had no problems doing the same things that Windows does. Yet they failed. Because that's not really what matters. You can do only so much with _only_ the OS.
I think what you really meant is "if I could get the same functionality out of my computer", which actually means the applications. E.g., you don't edit your digital photos with the OS core, and not even with MS Paint (that's an app, though), you use some program like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop or, if you're a masochistic cheapskate (yeah, I am one too) with the Gimp.
That's really what you need to do everything you could do with your old OS: an equivalent of the applications too.
That's the real entry barrier in the OS market. Writing a loader, a scheduler, a GUI and exporting some of that as libraries, is the easy part. But that doesn't even come close to letting you get the same use out of your computer. Also providing an equivalent to all the thousands of applications and games that exist for Windows, that's the hard part. That's where they fail.
Re:Duh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the things that I dislike about KDE is that it tries to be too much like windows - so no, people are only going to get familiar with something just once, but will continue to use it time and again many, many times more. So usability - please abandon familiarity with windows and its problems and focus on usability. We need something *new* - NOT familiar.
Re:Good luck trying to have changed incorporated (Score:3, Insightful)
Point is, he had a point. Changes have side-effects. Doing txnlog recovery after a crash without propagating the data to the backing store might have implications for transaction consistency. Have you evaluated all the risks your changes pose? Have you even conceived of a valid series of test-cases to prove your fix isn't going to cause worse problems?
I can understand why your patches might just be sitting around forever. I've had to be in the unfortunate situation of rejecting code we paid many thousands of dollars for a consultant to right, because it made bad assumptions and broke our environment.
I'm not saying you're wrong, nor right, only that politics is sometimes used as a catch-all to say, "Hey, we want stable product. Work WITH us, and we can work together."
That said, a great many developers are daft pricks...
Re:People are lazy (Score:2, Insightful)
shallow depth (Score:3, Insightful)
The writer didn't put his thinking cap on. People use new OSes all the time. Think about all the gadgets techies (and even non-techies) buy every couple years and how many different OSes are involved:
Chances are these are using OSes (sometimes very new) that people didn't use before the purchase. So what? The article seemed to focus on the desktop which is fine but that is only one OS out of dozens that people use every day. The desktop is arguably the most complex in terms of user interaction which leads it to be the something that people probably do not wish to keep remastering. I'm comfortable using several different desktop OSes and I still don't like to change my day-to-day computing environment. While the core of the issue from a user perspective may be a technical one at the convenience level the real issue is probably a marketing one. Plus, the licensing agreements between companies like Microsoft and Dell make it very difficult for another to get a foothold in the marketplace.
The end result should be that you don't know what OS in your desktop the same way that most people don't know what OS in their mobile phone, PDA, or mp3 player. It should be transparent and a non-issue for users. It should just work -- no matter what it is.
ironic (Score:2, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Step by step (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say (well you come across this way) you think it's 85% of what keeps Windows dominant.
I'd say it's more like 40%. You can run MS Office on Mac OSX and Linux(with crossover office) today, and there is no mass exodus. Also, about every office program I've seen, OO.org, Lotus SmartSuite, Etc... can open and save Office formats, not perfectly, but about as well as different versions of Office. And that's been true for over a decade also. Still no mass exodus.
I maintain that while Office is important, it is not more than one leg of what keeps Windows propped up. Removing Office won't get people to switch.
Because you still haven't addressed games, consumer hardware, ActiveX intranet apps, Exchange schedule management etc... The list goes on.
Re:Step by step (Score:1, Insightful)
So is
* It's used as default format by different office suites (OO and KOffice, hopefully Abiword will join in a couple of years)
So
* It's an ISO-standard (= great for government contracts)
That is the only advantage, if you can call it that. As long as the format is published, like
* It's also a standard that will not change with every version. That's the biggest advantage.
You mean how Microsoft office can save as either a format compatible with 97/2000/XP or the newer 2003 format? A format that spans three versions and 5 years doesn't sound like such a big change to me.
* It's available everywhere, not just on the latest versions of Windows. It's also available on older versions of Windows, Linux, MacOSX and Solaris
MS Office is available on the two established commercial platforms - Windows and Mac OS. There are compatible office suites on avery other major platform. While they may not all be free, most are decent priced. Hancom Office, Ability Office, Corel Office, Star Office, etc.
* It's used by OO which is pretty good backwards-compatible to MSO
OOo is pretty good backwards-compatible to MSO using
Free software won't save the world. MS Windows, MS Office, and every other piece of evil software isn't going anywhere.
http://en.hancom.com/products/hancomoffice20.html [hancom.com]
http://www.ability.com/index.php?ln=us [ability.com]
Re:Apps... (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter what you have ot have that "One thing" that will bring the OS to enough people that they'll start useing it for the other general computing tasks that all OSs do. Failing that there is no reason to use a new OS. Even if it can do everything my current system can do it has to do at least One thing significanly better.