I just think this is really the higher-level question that we should be asking as an industry: Linux — and to a smaller extent the Mac because it is OS/X, a Berkeley derivative — is reliant on the fact that the OS layer is stabilizing and becoming a commodity. That is, it would be great for both the Mac and Linux if nobody could make money on operating systems anymore because it was all generic and all the same and it all looked like 1970s 80s-ish Unix.
Now what if, as has happened in applications, the core abstraction of what is in a contemporary OS moves up by many notches? What if APIs become frameworks? What if a file system becomes more like a database? If higher level service-oriented architectures are in the underlying infrastructure as opposed to just generic standard C library runtime calls?
As a client side developer, I really want to take advantage of that stuff. It lets me be a whole lot more productive. But the more I do that the more I rely on higher-level infrastructure being around. So what I would ask you is the following: Are the Linux community and the Mac community prepared to step up their client-side investments to build higher-level frameworks to make it easier for me to code like a Microsoft is doing?
[…]
Restating the obvious, but at a high level, the good news is: As an industry, of all the players that you’ve talked about, we’re all agreeing on the wire. A service-oriented architecture — objects on the client, services as a way of dealing with servers–we’re all agreeing on that. It’s looking good for the customer, in that respect, because it doesn’t matter what’s on the client and what’s on the server, we’re all going in the same direction.