Big Versus Little: Are the Categories Breaking Down?
While Microsoft is a little embarrassed about the five-year march to Vista, IBM is bragging about its planned five-year project to upgrade z/OS, the operating system for its System z mainframe computers. The mainframe world is a different place. Although server farms and distributed services have been eating away at the mainframe market, IBM is bullish about its mainframe business, and one of the enablers of that business seems to be "little" virtual Linux servers.
Today the distinction between "big" and "little" operating systems is not really between mainframes and desktop machines, but between computers and consumer electronic devices such as cell phones and MP3 players. And here the identity crisis of operating systems is in full fugue.
Do you need or want a stripped-down version of a desktop OS in your cell phone or other device? Will you get one regardless of whether you want it? Microsoft keeps coming up with new versions of Windows for small devices, Linux is big in little devices, and as I write this, rumors are flying that Apple may join the little OS battle with a stripped-down Mac OS X. Would that be Mac OS x? These immigrants from "big" OS land compete with Java-enabled OSes and with some formidable entrenched embedded OSes, especially Symbian, which is the world leader in smartphone operating systems and has most of the phone players as investors. (The U.S. market for cell phones is an oddity, where most phones run Palm OS, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry software.)
As evidence that some of the players are rethinking, consider the odd saga of Palm, which spun off its OS to a new company, PalmSource, saw the spun-off company release a competitive device, and now is paying ACCESS, the current owner of PalmSource, for the use of the Palm OS source code. Oh, and Palm OS now runs on top of Linux. Not only are "little" operating systems not so little, they are sometimes layered on top of one another.
