Make mine to go!
At the application layer, the Unholy Grail for software vendors has been to lock-in the customer. For this evil Yin, customers attempt to balance the universe with platform agnostic Yang. If Bill Gates had died young and Windows had not been born, universal harmony might have been achieved earlier.
Wishful thinking aside, we witness a steady realignment of the stars as
customers find more ways of achieving platform indifference in pursuit of the
perfectly portable application. The obvious industry change came with the
birth of HTML and an entirely neutral user interface (Lord knows Microsoft’s
Minions tried to abduct this child while still in the cradle, but they are beginning to lose ground ).
Not all applications can be web based, so platform choice tends to be
dictated by the platform technical expertise of the vendor. Since nearly
everyone use Windows (save the brave souls at IBM and Novell, who have mandated
Linux desktops for all), most application vendors support a Microsoft user
interface.
Well, until IBM, the Eclipse Foundation, and NASA decided enough was enough.
Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Project) allows one to develop rich GUIs for multiple
platforms with a single code base. Since the GUI is often the most
labor and time intensive part of developing a new application, it become the
road block for many vendors who throw their hands skyward and submit to
Microsoft assimilation. RCP
allow them to make a portable GUI that runs on Linux, Macs, and yes Windows,
without being a slave to any of the three operating systems and associated APIs.
This may not sound exciting given that the combined Mac and Linux desktop market share hovers around 7-8%. After all, what vendor would add 15% effort to get 5% more market share. But as
the chickens and eggs argue about genealogy, we in technology marketing must
recognize the lead/lag affect of applications and operating systems.
People adopt operating systems to run applications, and for no other reason
(well, Linux bigots adopt Linux for the same reason most people voted for John
Kerry … out of pure hatred for the alternative). The probability of an
operating system being deployed is directly dependant on the applications a
company uses.
IBM is a case in point vis-a-vis RCP. Lotus Notes customers had
(allegedly) been demanding a Notes clients for Linux (and the cynic in me believes that 99.999% of this demand was coming from within IBM). So IBM, the champion of all things Open and of Eclipse in particular, used RCP to create their next Notes client for Linux and Macs.
IBM customers who deployed Windows on desktops in the past (in part of in whole)
due to the Windows-centric nature of the client, now have the option of
deploying a different desktop OS. This option did not exist before now.
The egg has spoken!
Only time will tell if Eclipse RCP changes the fundament of the market, but
HTML has shown us that it can be done, and that the market demands it.
Software start-ups will more likely adopt RCP early as they want to maximize
their TAM (Total Addressable Market) and grow the fattest revenue streams
quickly.
And if the IBM elephant can dance, then the rest of the industry might call the tune.
