Is there a cycle of OS innovation, 
or is stagnation a 10–15 year unavoidable path?

What is the difference between the Mac OS of 1984 and Mac OS X of 1999? Was it the file system, was it the graphics? The UI? The monochromatic vs. million colors? Was it its use? Definitely 15 years later we learned new paradigms and the practice of computer design and a life with constant interaction with computers was in full swing by 1999, not quite in 1984.

To produce an operating system is oh so complex, as there are many elements to be considered. But, that’s exactly where we stand today, I’d say the latest operating systems out there are Android and iOS, both nearly a decade old. We do not need to create/design a brand new OS just because we feel like it. But, because there is a need based on new practices, uses, and paradigms. And today, there are such changes and needs.

The desktops we used today at the very least resemble, with new stylized graphics, the desktops and interfaces of the mid-1990’s, talk about the most-basic skeumorphism, we still have desktops, in the case of Mac OS X, is the “Finder” where I cannot find anything unless I accommodate my setting appropriately. BTW, why to have spotlight as a search wheere there is a finder?

Talking about users, we now have a significant larger digital population. One that is living in hyperreality and constantly requires a connection. The OS, as we use it and is sold to us, that installation process of many hundreds of thousands of local files into a local device that interconnects it all and is very proprietary, is mostly gone. We need the most basic system that can give us access to the cloud, which is today’s OS.

Schiller and the Apple Inc. executive team are demonstrating what most of us, Mac OS X users, did not wanted to happen back in 2009–2010 when Steve Jobs’ health was deteriorating rapidly, that there were no innovative ideas on the Apple pipeline. The lack of innovation has been proven as well as it has been obvious, when parody and satire of almost half a decade ago has turned into today’s reality with this skit by Conan O’Brien. Today’s iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro, which mostly are different because of software based locks, are the same as the ridicule in the skit of the iPad Mini Mega and the iPad Mini Mega Micro Max (Micro Max = Pro.)

I find it interesting that over 25 years ago there were apps like Hypercard, truly an innovative solution at the time, that brought together images, text, web pages, audio, video and motion. And today, such App does not exist. Keynote is its closest relative, but not stronger in feature set.

Apple, not without fault, has not been able to procure the innovation it desperately needs today. Finding the right innovators is something large corporations have shown to struggle. Innovators usually have their own leads, choose their own paths and that’s something we’ve heard does not exactly shows the culture at Apple Inc. today. Hopefully it will change, I hope Apple is willing to collaborate and open its doors to people with ideas and models that can retake the company in new directions. Based on historical examples, we have Microsoft and IBM, and that seems like not such great platforms for radical innovation.

Organizations and teams start showing its innovation challenges and stagnation as soon as their offerings are exactly the same in different form factors. Apple in the beginning was a hardware company with a software that was fun and broke the paradigms of such times. Today, it is a hardware company that locks features through software that was mostly developed 10 or more years ago.

The operating system that is required today, is more clean, lean and less intrusive, more open sourced frameworks that can lead to very robust solutions where the power is given to App developers, for their products to be platform agnostic an bring interconnectivity and collaboration with ease. We live in a world full of API’s, cloud systems, co-location and network interoperability. Let’s open our minds, let’s trim proprietary practices and show that innovation and openness go together and we can all contribute.