Mac OS vs Windows vs Chrome OS. Who cares what OS you run? I care about the applications, and the SDKs used to build them
Everyone is so caught up in operating system wars, Chrome OS taking on Windows, becoming OS agnostic. I think this is the wrong way to think about all this.
It's true, I don't care what OS I run. I don't interact with the OS directly, I interact with the applications I'm using. An "OS" is nothing but a stack of frameworks, built on top of each other. So what's going to win this "war" is not the best OS, but the best SDK which leads to the best applications.The web has come *a long* way in the past 5 years in closing the gap between desktop and web applications. Software on the web, primary that from Google, has really shown us that a web browser really can power some amazing products.
Yet even today, the best applications generally live on the desktop. High performance games are only on the desktop. Large applications like Final Cut Pro and Photoshop won't run on the web. Why do power users still use Outlook/Entourage/Thunderbird? After so much progress on the web, why are companies making native Twitter clients for the desktop and mobile devices? Why are there over 50,000 native iPhone apps, when when you could always build a web app? It's because of the SDK. The browser has gained popularity as a development tool because it's cross platform, and it has the support of companies like Google. But as a developer myself, I still see web development as having the weakest tool set of any I have used. You can't beat XCode for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Or Visual Studio for developing Windows apps (I hear). There are some major advances coming in the web OS world. In particular, 280 North is doing some amazing things with their Cappuccino development framework, and Atlas IDE. For now, native Mac and iPhone applications are the products I enjoy most. Native SDKs and IDEs are my development tools of choice. I'm always going to build tools I want, using the SDKs I love. And for now, that's still Mac OS X. In fact, that's why I built Posterous around email. The idea of building web software to do things that work so well on the desktop already, just didn't make any sense to me.
