By Peter Cochrane, 2 July 2008 12:44
COMMENT
Written on the London Liverpool Street to Stansted Express and dispatched via my home LAN later the same day.
For about a decade now the established industry wisdom would have us believe technology is converging. The vision is that we will watch, play, communicate and browse on just one terminal, with all content and services appearing on all platforms.
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So I keep watching and waiting. But all I see is a growing divergence - more OSes, apps and media and comms formats.
Just recently I think I caught a glimpse of something that we can actually claim to be true convergence, and it has to do with Intel.
The processor giant's chipsets will now support OSes from Microsoft and Apple, as well as Ubuntu, Be, Linux and more.
That development is really significant. It is a pro-user move because it means we can actually run what we want and use software that ranges from free right up to a few hundred dollars.
Perhaps best of all we can also simultaneously run two or more OSes on one machine. This approach might be the route to true convergence - by spanning the gulf created by OS wars and allowing anything, on any platform, in any format.
It will be interesting to see how it all looks in another five years. But for now I'll keep watching and searching for more evidence of convergence.
Comments
There are 7 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Sorry Peter, I don't understand this article....
... I thought programs (OSes included) were written/compiled to run on a particular processor, not the other way around...
2. Richard
An interesting thought but what a shame that the "wrong" architecture has won.
Designers have used ingenious tricks to extend Intel's original architecture and instruction set.
As so often, alternative architectures which were better technically, failed commercially.
With current moves towards increased abstraction & virtualisation, perhaps we'll finally get better CPU architectures?
3. giles palmer
Aren't OSs becoming irrelevant as the browser becomes the app platform. In that respect we have had A LOT OF convergence already - you can run a browser on a mobile now or a pda or a computer - and maybe there will be a TV-based version of Firefox within the next few years. If there is, convergence will be complete.
4. Peter Cochrane
Anonymous Midlands
Not any more!
Peter
5. Peter Cochrane
Richard = When did the best-of-the-best ever win? It is usually down to other factors I'm afraid. Peter
6. Peter Cochrane
Giles = If only...I'm not sure that we are so far along that road yet! Peter
7. anonymous
Greater segmentation will ultimately cause fragmentation as we decide that the all in one, is not as good as a specific device or OS, after all as part of product design is one of the factors not a unique selling point?