Comment by maccam94
7 years ago
I think the biggest problem is building the application ecosystem. iOS and Android were able to attract developers because they were the first movers on the computer phone platform. Convincing people to use a new OS for desktop (or any existing) computing without any apps would be difficult, and vice-versa convincing devs to support a platform with no users is also tough.
I think it's actually much easier now to get people on a new OS then it was a decade ago, or in the 90s, or the 80s. The web is so centric that a new OS with a great browser has won half the battle (I could write five pages on how massively better a browser could be than Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. and I love Firefox and Opera and Vivaldi and Brave.)
ChromeOS has partly proved the point, especially among college students and younger. Anyway, a serious effort at a new OS, a whole new stack, along with a new office suite and other applications, could succeed with the right (large) team and funding. People aren't very loyal to Microsoft – they're not loved. And Apple users have no idea how much better computers could be, but they would if someone showed them.