we can all hope for development in MOS to continue..
we can all hope the same for AOS4...
...but as many of us sense (or should I say, 'fear'), the dramatic reality of the matter is that the long term sustainability of a platform in general or operating system in particular, is determined by market forces .
Speculating and comparing OSs feature-wise is all very good (and entertaining!) but it tell us very little about which one will survive in the medium-term and spread to a greater user base.
If you want to do more than wishful thinking and desire to genuinely understand and (to a small extent) be able to make informed guesses with a reasonable chance of getting it right then you may want to see what the experts have to say.
There are people who have done more than just speculate: they have observed, measured, modelled and drawn conclusions from the spread of past technologies (be they OSs, specific IT products, or even biomedical innovations) and are in a position to talk with some confidence about which technology succeeds and which one is doomed to failure. They have looked into market forces, the technology's characteristics down to individual user preferences and have compiled lists of 'determinants' of success.
I would not dare try to explain the concept in the few lines of this post but to give an idea of the potency of such insights, here are the most fundamental ones as mentioned by such people as Everett Rogers:
-the technology's relative advantage
-the technology's cost
-the competitive pressure
-compatibility
-complementarity
-observability
-trialability
I guess this puts into perspective why microsoft has dominated the market. Your final prediction depends a lot on your estimates of these determinants but broadly IMHO, I expect AROS to be around the longest and have, by far (that should be in capitals, FAR), the biggest user base - however always falling short of going mainstream, say to the extent that linux has.
It is a hobby OS and it has the potential to make a great many of us, very, very happy in our everyday computing and even allow us to do serious work on it but don't expect it (even in the best case scenario) to have a much greater appeal than your average linux distro.
As far as AOS4, MOS are concerned, ironically IMHO MOS still has greater potential to spread more broadly - eventually even 'fusing' with AROS. This boils down to price and the number of existing adopters and developers. I will be extremely surprised to see AOS4 developed commercially in three years from now, but who knows, weirder things have happened! I certainly hope so! :-)
p.s.
Look out at amazon for Rogers (2003), "The Diffusion of Innovations"
