>>OS only matters when it really does matter- which is hardly ever once you eliminate the lock-in.

It still matters a lot because serious lockins still exist.

Go to any graphic design or printing company and tell them that their Mac's aren't important and that any old platform will do and you'd better be wearing NFL padding. Basically the Postscript world belongs to Apple.

My son and daughter in law are engineers and if the platform can't handle heavy duty CAD and the large format peripherals associated with it, basically it doesn't exist for them.

CAD or Quark on a tablet?
Sounds silly to me, but the market will decide it.
Plug-and-play was what made me switch from SCO Unix to Windows in late 90's. All the manufacturers jumped on board and hours of excruciating work trying to make a printer work with SCO Unix became minutes with Windows.
That was too bad. In every other respect SCO Unix was a better platform.













>>>But the backend, if local is not over by a long shot: there are the phone routers adding USB storage, NAS servers from ARM over Atom to current Pentiums, media servers running Linux or Windows, "real" server backends where Win and Linux duke it put again but Linux has numbers in favor...
>
>Seems to me the Lianja effect will prevail: who cares about the OS if an application runs regardless. The days of application lock-in seem to be over and the OS only matters when it really does matter- which is hardly ever once you eliminate the lock-in.