14 DAY TRIAL // The idea of OS convergence is starting to take a hold in the world and major companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical are working hard to achieve it. There seems to be a race going on and all the players want to reach the finish as soon as possible.
All the companies mentioned above have software products that run across a number of devices, but they all face the same problem. The developers are forced to make different products for each of those platforms, even though they try to achieve the same thing at the base level.
Let's take Microsoft and Windows for example. The Redmond company has Window 8.1 for the desktop, Windows RT for tablets, and Windows Phone. They share a number of similarities, but Microsoft is looking to also achieve convergence in the near future.
The first step in convergence is to allow developers to make one kind of application for all platforms. This concept already works for some of the apps, but it will take the Redmond giant a while to achieve the same result for all the devices. Beyond the visual similarities between the various Windows versions, the differences are quite consistent, especially between Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone.
Apple, on the other hand, seems to be a lot closer to the convergence goal. Developers are now able to make applications for both iPads and iPhones with ease, and the developers have finally brought the iOS theming to Mac OS X.
All the Apple platforms are also converging, but it looks to be happening more from inertia than from a concerted effort. It's clear that Apple will eventually have the same kind of experience for its users, no matter what platform, but they still have a long way to go.
Canonical is the only company of the three that shared its goals right from the start. They want to have a single operating system spanning on all the supported platforms – desktop, tablet, and phone. Their efforts go beyond the visual aspect of the operating system.
Canonical released an Ubuntu SDK that allows developers to make only one kind of application that works on any platform, and there already are a number of apps from Ubuntu Touch that are running on the desktop.
Ubuntu developers are working towards uniting the codebase for all platforms, which means that, when they are done, it will be possible to have a single OS that can be installed anywhere. That will be true convergence, although it will take at least a year to make it work in a usable form (about two Ubuntu development cycles).
Canonical, Microsoft, and Apple want the same thing from their operating systems, but they go about it in different ways. It's only possible to estimate for Canonical how long it will take them to achieve their goal because their product is open source, but it's much harder to do this for the other companies.
It's going to be a close race and it's difficult to anticipate who is going to win it.