14 DAY TRIAL // US companies have been drifting away from PCs and towards mobile devices and gadgets lately, the same way demand for computers has been dropping, but this might have a fairly unexpected consequence, namely the rise of a new operating system.
Among the many things happening on the PC front, some are not very encouraging, like, as Gartner discovered, sales are going to slow down.
One consequence of this is the impending war over who gets most of the PC orders from India, or so reports say.
There is, however, another possible effect, one that is much more subtle, for now at least, and only a matter of speculation at present.
As Digitimes has it, the way the US has been laying off on the PC front might act as a signal for Asian countries to step up and take charge.
In fact, depending on how things go, and how much more prominent Asian companies get, they may consider creating an operating system of their own in the next 20 years or so.
At least, this is what Acer founder Stan Shih is reported to have said, pointing out that PCs are still irreplaceable tools.
Shih says that control of the IT market has already begun to pass over to Asia, where Japan and China have invested much in the field.
As such, it is quite possible that one or more companies will seriously start to work on the making of a new operating system.
Japan did experiment with the idea, but the software was only supported by local brand vendors and, thus, never reached any sort of global status or recognition, eventually failing altogether.
Then again, Taiwan, another major name on the IT market, doesn't actually have too big a reason to make an OS at all.
Still, it is a possibility that, whether co-developed with US companies or not, Asia will create a new operating system, one that will either coexist with or rival Microsoft's Windows.