I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of operating systems lately. Why is there no operating system vendor that focuses on being a platform for applications, rather than trying to compete directly in the application space?

Maybe this is a naive question, but it really makes application developer’s lives a huge pain to have to compete with platform vendors all the time, and it’s surprising to me that the market puts up with it. It also brings up the whole “core competency” argument, can one company really do two fairly specialized things well?

These are who I consider to be the top-tier OS vendors:

  • Microsoft Windows
  • Apple Mac OS X
  • Ubuntu Linux

Why don’t any of them provide just the base OS + gotta-have applications (editor, email, web), and give the ISVs the ability to:

  • register new applications in a central catalog
  • deliver updates to specific applications
  • send crash data back to the vendor

This would allow the OS vendor to focus on the core OS functionality, and provide means to the users to select applications that suited their needs (shipping preinstalled with the top editor, email and web clients, of course). Having formal reviewers as well as user ratings would be a great way to promote good and trustworthy applications.

I don’t anticipate any of these top-tier OS vendors focusing on this space, although for different reasons.


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