Richard Martin Blog: Why The OS Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Making big headlines in the business and tech press, the Nielsen Co. reported Android has overtaken BlackBerry and the iPhone’s iOS to become the most popular mobile operating system in the U.S. This development has been barreling the track for some time, so it’s not a surprise.

It also doesn’t matter, according to Jean Louis Gassée, who is one of the sharpest bloggers on communications services and hardware, because Android and iOS (though not BlackBerry) are essentially derivatives of the Unix kernel. “Today, there’s only one operating system: Unix," Gassée argued recently. “This is why I contend that the OS doesn’t matter — or that we need to take another look at the word’s content, at what we mean when we say ‘Operating System.’"

Essentially, not only the two leading operating systems from the world’s two most innovative technology companies, but also the new tablet OS from RIM, QNX, Palm’s WebOS and Nokia’s MeeGo are all, at heart, based on Linux kernels.

This is a strange argument when you consider the fact that Android and the iPhone have transformed the mobile and wireless industry and driven consumers to base their purchases on them, rather than on the carrier or branding or any other consideration. A closer look, though, reveals that Gassée and I are in agreement. What matters is not the underlying source code for the OS, but the user-interacting manifestations thereof: the applications and the UI.

“This is today’s OS," wrote JLG. “User experience. Development tools."

Exactly. The platform is the brand. And that is what really matters today.