Fragmentation?
So I was sitting here reading this and the thought occurred to me that from an IT professional angle this isnt such a great thing playing out on the desktop.
Right now, we, as a community really have to deal with 3 OSes:
Windows (say 90-95% of desktop/ anywhere from 10-90% of servers depending)
MacOS (lets face it - about 5-10% of our desktop community give or take unless you are a big Mac shop)
Linux/Unix (say 1-5% of desktop in a large corp, maybe more in an adventurous smaller company, 10-90% of your server install)
So realistically, and not trying to put anyone down, and yes its with a big wide brush, you end up with your desktop support team being primarily windows with some MacOS skills, and your server team being a Win/Linux (Winux?) type of person. And the network guys over in the corner being grumpy old sods who dont agree with anything :)
So how does all this play into the support model? BES was bad enough. iPhone and Android at least both play into the same ActiveSync/IMAP/POP space. Palms - I mean WebOS? And if this spreads to the table/desktop fields then what?
One of the beautiful things about the whole Winux world is that the systems do, to some degree, play nicely with each other. Common file formats, mostly common applications give or take IIS/Apache and Exchange. One of the reasons I always thought MacOS failed in the server space was because of all the extensions they introduced (the .crap files littered everywhere) and the fact that they did have to think different to do the same things. So moving back to the desktop, OpenOffice for example plays well on both and files cascade around. Gimp/Photoshop play well together. Etc. Etc. But where does a more closed eco system like WebOS come in?
I cant see it becoming widely adopted, and on the corporate front, I cant see it becoming widely supported. But then maybe I'm becoming a crusty old geek these days.