Operating Systems Makers vs Software Developers

is the same as

Paper Manufacturers vs Book Authors (in a special case)

Say that book authors would have to totally re-write their books (or at least a good part of it) every time they wanted to write a book on a different kind of paper (say no word processor, its all by hand for the sake of the analogy). Paper manufacturers create paper and none of them fit in the same bindings so that they can be read as a book. To continue the analogy, book readers can only keep books on their bookshelves of one kind of binding, and thus one kind of paper.

So in this analogy, if book authors want to reach people with several different kinds of bookcases, they will have to hand write their books onto several different kinds of paper. This will take a lot more time and money for their expenses and the end results will be that their books can either reach less people, or they can spend less time writing the books to have more time write it to the different paper types.

In this analogy we can see that software developers have the same problems. Off of a given period of time and money, if there are more platforms that need to be accomidated to then the software developers will have to write their software for more platforms just like the book authors for different types of paper. This means it will either cost more money and time (which the developers may not have) to reach the same amount of people if there was only 1 main OS, or they will have to spend less time creating the software so that they have more time to cross platform it.

So this leads to less detailed software, more bugs, etc, as a definitely possibility for smaller developers to keep up. If people dont mind all the small developers going out of business because they cant keep up, then why bother to be upset with the huge ones running everything as it is?

Just some more food for thought on the subject.

-Geoff