A computer operating system is a piece of software that turns the hardware alive. In history, both Apple and Windows operating system have made huge amount of money. However, in recent years, because of the competition from free Linux and Android, operating system are in danger of becoming of low margin business. What could an operating system innovate to keep on fending off the competition from the cheaper ones?
The first one is to improve the customer experience.
Basically, there should be richer open box experiences available on proprietary Operation System than a free operating system. All the software companies that are interested in running promotion should be able to give their free trials installed on the proprietary operating system.
The second one is to improve the developer experience.
In order to improve the developer experience, there are developers who wants to innovate, you got to empower them to innovate on the proprietary operating system because you can provide more components that can be re-used just as is. You got to make better documentation of the API, provide more extensive sample code, keep on enhancing the functionality of the existing API. Implement expensive and widely used algorithm, e.g. singular value decomposition, deep learning, at the low level, so that others love the proprietary implementation better than others.
The third one is to reduce the total cost of ownership.
Owning a computer is not only about acquisition cost. Although the acquisition cost for Linux is zero, maintaining it is not. Focusing on improving the tools that are important to manage each component will likely to reduce the total cost ownership. For example, there should be a dash board for network, dashboard for printing, dashboard for file sharing, dashboard for Internet usage, dashboard for security.
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