The new OS war will be between operating systems that can work on all types of digital screens.

THE NEW ‘OS’ WARS: WINNERS AND LOSERS

By: Tim Bajarin (10.29.2010)

The new OS war will be between operating systems that can work on all types of digital screens.

For decades, when people talked about OS wars, they were mostly referring to the Windows vs. Mac battle. These two operating systems have dominated the PC landscape with Windows owning about 90 percent of the market. This OS war has been great for the PC industry, because as Apple continues to innovate on its OS platform, it forces Microsoft to innovate as well, and in turn, consumers constantly receive new and more powerful OS platforms for their PCs.

Now there is a another OS war developing around smartphones, and if you think the PC OS wars were nasty, just wait for this OS war to heat up. We've already seen charged rhetoric from Apple CEO Steve Jobs over the iPhone, Andy Rubin at Google defending Android against the competition, and RIM's CEO Jim Balsillie ranting about Jobs and company during the iPhone antenna dilemma. All of these folks realize that the stakes are very high and that they need to do whatever is necessary to keep the market looking at them and pushing their platforms forward. To put these OS stakes into perspective, market researchers say that 1.2 billion cell phones will be sold worldwide this year. And while smartphones represent only 22 percent of the cell phone market for 2010, they will make up 60 percent of the market in the U.S. by 2012 and 65 percent of all cell phones sold worldwide will be smartphones by 2015. That means that by 2015 we could see as many as 750 million smartphones sold around the world, which is a massive market and will create amazing market opportunities.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371776,00.asp, accessed on November 4, 2010.