What do we look for while buying a house, or while searching for a rented apartment. How livable and usable that place is. How well connected with the rest of the world it is and how close are the most commonly used services. Like money, goods and communication. Are there theaters nearby or music stores or libraries (depending on where you lie on the cool-nerd spectrum) etc.

Software market is transforming and shaping up in quite a similar fashion. OS being the actual house. We use it all the time. We look for how well connected it is to social network or to the world wide web (through the most appropriate browser). Are there any places to hangout (pun intended), what about entertainment, movies, songs. Are there any web stores. Pretty recently we have seen companies trying to respond to not just one piece of this puzzle but to the whole solution. They have taken cognizance of the fact that the secret to comprehensive growth is to tackle the problem in totality. Google that started primarily as search and later mail, is delving into OS and social networking. It is fighting for top share in browser market. It tested the waters in music and is renting movies through youtube. Similarly Apple with iOS, lion, appstore, itunes store and ibooks is trying to claim its own right on the software real estate by building its own self sustainable and also self-managed system. Microsoft of course comes up with a wild idea every once in a while, be it live or bing or ie 10 or facebook ties, or 365 but is doing what it can to catch up. A single vertical might be startup’s cake but big players like these are building not just one service or estate rather every single one of them its building its own ecosystem. So that no matter what the customers want, they don’t feel the need to explore newer areas. That they stay within the colonies built by these giants. Sooner or later the only choice that the users would have to make would perhaps be which system do they want to be a part of. I do not wish to suggest that these systems would be isolated and the choice would be rigid. Also not all of these systems would be equally vibrant and/or diverse. Nor would they evolve at the same rate. Some would be rich is certain assets while deficient in others. They would not be perfect but most probably be (or at least attempt to be) self reliant. Cross linkages and interdependence, as always, would be inevitable. But just like human ecosystems they would be at both micro and macro levels. Very similar to interactions within society and between states. For the sake of our own sanity and workability we would have to choose one from the many. Though there still would be inter connections and hopefully enough flexibility, but none the less, that choice would define to a large extent what we would do and how we would live in the software world. Should we be wary of this apparent segmentation of virtual landscape, perhaps.