Mountain Lion Vs. Windows 8: Two Paths To Platform Convergence

Now that Apple's offering a hide preview of OS X Mountain Lion , you can start to compare it with that other new working network forthcoming after that this year, Windows 8 . In particular, you can see how both OSes pull motivation from, and target to confederate with, mobile devices. Each OS faces the same simple challenge, but approaches the complaint with not similar strategies.

It's partly a function of circumstance. Because of the recognition of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Apple has a sufficient stronger marketplace location in mobile than in desktop. Microsoft's location is reversed, and then some: Windows and even Xbox are sufficient mightier than Windows Phone.

Apple uses its strength in phones and tablets to sell Macs. As a result, users start to design the same kinds of interfaces and software services on the desktop that they suffer on their phones and tablets: Multitouch, App Stores, instant storage and syncing in the cloud. Apple is receiving these iOS mainstays, and delivering them to Mac computers.

Meanwhile, for years, Microsoft did the same thing in reverse. It attempted to reconstruct " Mighty Microsoft ," porting the look and feel of desktop Windows and renouned software downloads similar to Office to Windows Mobile. It didn't unequivocally work.

After introducing Xbox 360, Zune, and at last Windows Phone 7, Microsoft was at last able to use its post-PC platforms as real-world lab instruments for design and interface ideas it couldn't right away deliver to Windows. Windows 8 at last brings all of these together in to a singular ethics bottom and growth environment.

But even if desktop Windows gets rested by this distillate of ideas from Microsoft's other products, it still waste to be seen if Windows 8 and its ARM-architected siblings can obviously have the same success in mobile and inscription gadgets that Microsoft has had on the desktop.

Now, in a few ways, Apple is more prudent than Microsoft. Precisely since it's been so successful in mobile, and since it has a stronger must be submitted a intelligible product line, Apple needs to keep desktop, mobile and inscription computing neatly defined. It's restraining all 3 together by its software services, but the form factors and earthy interfaces of its gadgets sojourn quite different.

Microsoft can reunite its software line, then spin it over to hardware allies that can emanate a outrageous operation of devices, from a mobile phone to a desktop building and all in between. For example, Microsoft can offer Windows 8 for both Intel and ARM, and manufacturers will produce tablets and netbooks for both platforms that instead look more or reduction identical.

It's two not similar solutions to the "strategy tax," which is unequivocally a taxation on assets. Apple's great item is the iPad. It has to figure out how to precedence that item without spending it all away. Microsoft's great item is Windows. It has to figure out how to outlay that item without exerting as well sufficient precedence over everybody else in its product chain.