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Why New OSes Don't Catch On
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jul 05, 2005 07:38 PM
from the same-reasons-restaurants-fail dept.
from the same-reasons-restaurants-fail dept.
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."
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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
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.
Parent
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...).
Parent
Step by step (Score:4, Interesting)
It will take some time, but in small steps it is coming along.
The most important thing for the next 10 years is the adoption of the OASIS-format, which offers these advantages over .doc:
Let's not forget that Microsoft cannot bundle MSOffice with Windows because almost half of their revenue is generated by it and doing so would put them deeply into the red. They also can't lower the price too much for the same reasons.
So, yes it will take quite long (I'd say about 10 years) but OASIS will become the standard.
Removing the Windows desktop domination will be the next step.
Parent
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a real fine line between doing something that no one else is doing versus doing something because you don't like the way other people did it. I'd be open to switching my OS if a new OS did everything that my existing OS did *and* added a bunch of new stuff that made the effort worthwhile. My (admittedly limited) experience with alternative OS projects is that they're trying to solve problems that others have already solved. A new OS probably won't make that much of a difference to me.
This is usually the case, but some forks of existing code bases (consider dragonfly bsd [dragonflybsd.org]) are very talented developers who have ideas that can't possibly be worked into larger problems because of the disruption they would cause. DFBSD should be incorporating some "new" concepts that (as far as I can tell) aren't in ANY other OS. The other factors that came into play when the OS was started (much like the other BSD forks, the founder/leader was removed from an existing BSD project) seem to be mostly secondary to the technical goals.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now linux is in a position for a small number of converts from other OSes, but it needed the installed Unix user base to get to that point.
Parent
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
Parent
Re:Duh.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Happily, the Linux Desktop developers are aware of this and are actively optimising everything all across the board, from Kernel to X to the desktop libraries to the DEs themselves.
GNOME and KDE will probably never run well on, say, 96MB of RAM, but at least the trend is to get faster and less memory-hungry - unlike the OS of a certain rival purveyor ;)
Parent
NicheOS's - Niche Hardware or Great Features? (Score:5, Interesting)
But why would I put a niche OS on PC hardware? Niche Linux distributions like MythTV, maybe, or LTSP lightweight distros designed to use old hardware as a thin client, or LiveCD OpenBSD firewall things or whatever.) Emulators for other hardware environments, maybe (one of the Psion development environments booted from PC MS-DOS mode, and I gather there are some gamer emulators that do similar things, and you used to need to run DOOM in MS-DOS instead of Windows to get native hardware access or something.)
Pen-based OS's were the last niche OS I saw that looked really interesting as a user - though they could just as well be a user interface on top of a full-featured operating system, and of course they choked and died and were replaced by PalmOS and Wince. QNX has always been somewhat interesting as hacker environment, because it's real-time, blazingly fast, and fits inside the Level 1 cache on your older CPU, though the last time I tried it it didn't have a driver for my Ethernet cards and was therefore pretty useless.
Any OS that wants me to spend time installing it had better have a lot of interesting features, or a few VERY interesting features, and it needs to run on a LiveCD (or floppy) on an older PC like a Pentium133 with 64MB RAM, because I'm not going to scrag my main machine to play with it. Neither of these includes a Reality Distortion Field, so their web pages need to actually say why they're interesting - and they don't. Syllable provides no obvious value - its web page says it's a fork off a 3-year-old PersonalEgoOS and doesn't say why it's more interesting than a well-supported OS. SkyOS looks like it has a screenshot tour and an 18MB AVI video tour, but it's too slashdotted to actually display those things, and screenshots might tell me why I want a new wallpaper or window manager but aren't the same as telling me what the OS *does* that's interesting - telling me that they'd like to offer a bounty for getting somebody to port OpenOffice just means they're running behind Linux and the BSDs - ZZZZ.
Parent
EROS-os and Plan 9, however, are cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
Both of these OS's were designed in a deep academic environment to be able to do really interesting things, and they're fundamentally different from just building Yet Another Unix-like thing with a window system on it (ok, Plan 9 did evolve from Unix, and does have an aggressively different window system, but it's not just random me-too-ism.)
Parent
Re:EROS-os and Plan 9, however, are cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
I first heard about Tandem from a friend. He saw them at a computer show in London. During the computer show, there was another show, the Ideal Home Exhibition, going on elsewhere in the same building. I guess there wasn't a whole lot of effective power conditioning going on in the building, because every time the sales droids in the Ideal Home expo cranked up washing machines, dishwashers and other power equipment, every computer at the computer show would crash. The sole exception being the Tandem booth - it just kept on trucking while everyone else was rebooting...
Parent
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't my first article and no, I'm not new.
click [osnews.com] (got featured on /.)
click [expert-zone.com] (got featured on /.)
here [osnews.com]
Just a small selection. I've written over 20 or so articles. Just do a little Google search before insulting someone, would you?
Parent
Apps... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sky OS is falling (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sky OS is falling (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
The reason I haven't used them. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The reason I haven't used them. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm really curious as to what it was about BeOS that would make you want to part with your hard-earned money to buy a copy. Was there some feature of the OS that you felt made it worth the cash?
Re:The reason I haven't used them. (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally bought BeOS 4 after trying out the bootable demo cd that was available at the time.
When I loaded the demo I went from BIOS to full useability in under 20 seconds, so I thought that was pretty cool.
My BeOS machine was an extra computer at I had laying around. After a few weeks of using the OS and finding I could do mostly everything I did on my windows box(email,websurf,rip mp3s,listen to said mp3s with the wonderful soundplay) I decided to move the HDD into my main computer and dual boot windows and Be. For about a year I used BeOS a majority of the time.
I will admit there was one reason I never gave up Windows totally for Be...games. I liked a lot of the freeware games for Be, mostly puzzle games but none of the mainstream dev houses would port for it. I finally had to give up on Be after OS5 came out and they took more out than they put in. I think I enjoyed it most for the potential it had, probably the same reason I still have and Amiga 500 in a corner that still gets used.
Parent
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.
Parent
Obviousman (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obviousman (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Obviousman (Score:5, Funny)
Now, I've got to warn people that it hurts to rub lemon juice into paper cuts! Quick! To the ObviousMobile!
In case you missed it, that's it parked over there. It's the twelve-wheeled vehicle with a rocket engine, eighteen strobe lights, that deafening siren, and a rotating sign on top that says "This is the ObviousMobile, property of Captain Obvious" in six foot tall neon orange letters. See it? Not the Civic. It's the one next to it.
Parent
It's the drivers, stupid! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's the drivers, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, come on.
Parent
It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:5, Interesting)
People still use the Atari ST (mainly the emulator version) to do music, because there are useful applications there.
For the most part, people really don't care what OS they are using, just as long as they can accomplish whatever tasks they need to do.
Re:It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know how she did it.
Parent
Re:It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, you don't expect them to come right out and say 'look at porn', do you?
Parent
Re:It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
Parent
Re:Good luck trying to have changed incorporated (Score:4, Interesting)
What I found greatly shocked me. Open source programmers are like politicians: once they are successful, they protect their position in every way possible, without hesitating to publically embarrass you in forums, even if you explain to them with a million arguments that their piece of code is wrong.
I had such an experience with a gaming programming library (it's name starts with A..., and the word is of Latin origin). The library's forums are basically 'run' by a few people in the same way that Mafia runs its business: if you want in, you have to kiss the boss' hand. If you don't, then every comment you make will be used against you, they will humiliate you in public, and you will be banned for just daring to disagree and present your arguments. There are a bunch of people playing the leaders, and all the rest follow with sheep mentality. Let me give you an example: one of the "leaders" posted a library add on for 2d parallax scrolling that run in 30 FPS; I took the code and made it run in over 70 FPS; instead of the community being happy that such a good piece of code existed, I was told to "play with the program" and "show my respect", otherwise I would be banned! After that (and lots of other things), I quitted not only participating in the forums but basically gave up any plans of offering work for the open source world. It is just so much hypocrisy around, that I now think (and you may laugh about it) that humanity is doomed to self destruction with such attitude.
By the way, that library has been in version 4 for quite a few years, with an API good enough for DOS but not for modern O/Ses like Windows or Linux. There was a try to modernize it, but version 5 died a painful death due to 'internal politics' (i.e. its developers all wanted the biggest share of the fame pie, so the project naturally died).
I too apologise for the bitterness, but I had to say it, because I consider it totally stupid for humanity to act like that. We can accomplish great things working together, but it seems noone wants them unless they are the protagonists.
Parent
Maturity & Potential. Gen Purpose & Specia (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question is... (Score:5, Informative)
It's "why do they ever catch on?"
Changing your OS changes everything about your computing environment. It's like saying, "I know you like this air stuff you're breathing, but...wanna to try this nifty hyper-oxygenated liquid to breathe? It has so many advantages, and it's really cool!"
Would you make the switch?
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.
Parent
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.
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.
Ignoring the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
* Windows offers broad compatibility due to its dominant market share. You buy software or hardware off the shelf and can pretty much assume it will work.
* OS X offers (currently) freedom from viruses and trojans, the availability of mainstream software tools, and access to arguably superior creative software.
* Linux offers power and configurability; plus it appeals to many people philosophically.
Yes, I read the article; but please don't hold that against me.
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.
Pining... (Score:3, Interesting)
Reading the various systems on oldcomputers.com, one realizes that it wasn't that long ago when nearly every new computer had its own OS. And each OS had its advantages and disadvantages and each one had a decent shot at becoming popular. The advocacy that sprouted up around each particular flavor du machine was always fun for a time.
People are lazy (Score:5, Interesting)
People don't adopt new OSes because they are lazy, and learning a new OS takes work.
Seriously--my dad just bought a new iBook, after using 'doze all his life, and quit using it after just a few weeks because it was, in his words, "too much work" to learn the new system.
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?
Ha. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lack of simple, shared application models.
If all a person needs is web-browsing, almost any os will do, but the point of a general-purpose computer is that its general purpose, and you can use it however you like. Simple app models become more specialized, and the network access anything anywhere model becomes the use linux for io or server app x, windows for gui app y, and maybe a mac for design/pub app z, cause those are the platforms specialized for each.
These are generalizations by the way, so the 50 people lining up to flame me can chill a sec. I have one of each machine running right now, and though I can do nearly everything on each of them, when it comes down to it sometimes I just need to switch over to one to get the job done. Try burning dvds the way you want (verified and with different formats) well without mac toast(or PIM stuff), or playing quickly with files on a network share without a set of linux terminals (never found a good term on a mac, and I hate winSMB, bleh), or watching funny(wmv/bad mp4) video encodes/playing games without windows.
Yes, I could probably use 1 system for all these things, but if I ever wanted to play games or prog VC++, Id need windows with a linux server, and well that just sucks, esp with 2 screens.
Its really the application holes that define OSs more than the functionality. A lack of MS Word(tm) is more likely to hold back Joe User from linux more than its incredible bounty of emacs plugins. On the other hand I gave my wife a mac mini, and never seen her so happy with a computer before.
It's called barrier to entry in economics (Score:3, Interesting)
GM said thje same thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
This was in precisely the same year that Soichiro Honda, who only recently had started a company that mated washing machine motors to bicycle frames, showed his first car at the Tokyo motor show, its chain drive revealing its origins.
Talk about hubris!
Based on this, I would rather predict dozens if not hundreds of dominant OSes in the next hundred years or less.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent