A New OS War Is About to Begin

For most of my career, the OS Wars have referred to the battle between Apple's macOS and Microsoft's Windows. In the last decade, that has expanded to include iOS vs. Android on mobile devices.

Now we are about to move into what I call the mini operating systems wars for edge devices, or those that sit at the edge of a cloud-based solution. Think smart thermostats, smart lights, or internet-connected parking meters and lamp posts.

For decades, we have had many devices at the edge that used sensors in cars and appliances, but their intelligence was controlled by an internal CPU and a tiny OS called a real time OS (RTOS). Now, Qualcomm, Intel, and other CPU makers are putting more powerful chips in edge devices to deliver a form of distributed computing where some computing is done on the edge device and a minimal amount is done in the cloud.

At the moment, there are two main contenders for what I call a Mini OS: Microsoft and Google. As Windows Central outlined recently, this so-called Windows Core OS "is a common denominator for Windows that works cross-platform, on any device type or architecture, that can be enhanced with modular extensions that gives devices features and experiences where necessary."

This would allow Microsoft or its partners to create application-specific devices and/or use this Core OS to make edge devices smart. It could bring perhaps billions of devices into the Windows ecosystem and allow it to grow its services model exponentially.

Google's solution appears to be Fuscia. Details are scant, but Richard Windsor, an analyst at Edison Investment Research says "Fuchsia looks most suited to be used in embedded systems such as vehicles, white goods, machinery, wearables and so on. Consequently, this could be a single replacement for Android Auto and Android Wear."

"Fuchsia was first noticed on GitHub in August 2016 and differs from Android in that it is not based on Linux but on a kernel called Magenta, which looks more like a kernel that is typically used for embedded systems such as vehicle infotainment units, white goods and so on. Fuchsia is also a real-time operating system (RTOS) which tend to be used for smaller systems which are typically embedded where response time is critical to the user experience," Windsor says.

To date, I don't see a similar Mini OS coming from Apple, but I can't imagine it's not on Cupertino's radar.

This news should not come as much of a surprise to serious industry watchers since the idea of edge devices becoming part of a distributed computing model has been in play for a long time. However, the move by Intel, Qualcomm, and others does beg for some type of beefed-up RTOS, or in these cases, perhaps a serious modular extension of each of these companies' current OSes.

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