While my previous post chronicled potholes on the 3 operating system (OS) highway, this past week carried some pleasant surprises. First, I added a device to the stack by using a windows desktop PC at home. Granted this is the same OS as the laptop in my experiment, but it is a different device and using it was easy. I also introduced a new printer and attempted to use it with four different devices.
Multi-OS Tools Make Device Swapping Easy
The tools I am using to navigate computing across three different devices (windows laptop, iOS iPad, Android smartphone) also make it easier to utilize other devices. When I sat down at the desktop, I pulled up Dropbox to access a document I needed to edit. Once it was edited, I saved it and later in the day accessed the same document from my laptop. Very convenient.
While editing the document on the desktop, I also logged into Pocket to quickly locate a source article with data relevant to my work that I had bookmarked while on my smartphone. Finally, I pulled up my Gmail and RoundCube Email accounts and took care of some messaging. No problem.
Wireless Printing Designed for Mobility
The other pleasant surprise was installing a new wireless HP printer at home. For the laptop and desktop I loaded the printer drivers with the included CD and the printing and scanning worked immediately. No surprise there.
However, the next day I printed a PDF from the Safari Browser on my iPad and it automatically found the printer and began the print job. No driver load necessary. That same day I sent an attached document from my Android smartphone to the printer’s eprint email address provided by HP. It recognized the attachment and automatically printed it. Customer delight.
OS Traversing Ecosystem for the Mobile Era
Smart tools such as HP printers and cloud applications like Dropbox are the key enablers diminishing the traditional OS lock-in. In the past, moving from one device to another was a hassle. Moving to a device with different OS was more like trying to navigate in a country where you couldn’t speak the language, didn’t have a translator or guidebook and no one would even attempt to assist you.
Last week Microsoft announced its new Surface tablet. It will be the first tablet with Microsoft Office pre-installed and will run on the same OS as new Windows PCs and Windows smartphones. There was a time when this would have provided a big advantage – seamless computing and user experience across all devices. While the common user experience across all devices still may be a hit, the seamless computing experience is less and less of a barrier when using mutliple operating systems. There is no doubt that the OS can impact the computing experience even on one device. However, it is no longer a the barrier it once was to utilizing devices that happen to run an altneraive OS. This is thanks to a rapidly developing application ecosystem committed to providing easy cross-OS portability. Is Microsoft developing to a paradigm that no longer exists?
What do you think? Comment below.
Related Reading
