"Operating software" refers specifically to operating systems but also includes file structures, database systems, and programming languages which stand on the OS platform. To a certain degree word processors, email clients, and spread sheets are also included. Collectively, their purpose is to help us use computers better. They package computer capabilities, translating between what computers "understand" and what we understand.
The complex demands of operating software increasingly abandons informability ... information capability. Where it once contributed to it, operating software has long since become an obstacle to information management, not quite so much for what it does or doesn't do, but because its complexities, foibles, inconsistencies, and incompetencies steal vast amounts of attention and resources away from actually managing information. As technology changes all we're really doing with operating software is reinventing new ways to indirectly address(or not) the same old information functions that existed long before the computer was invented ... doing the same thing over and over and over again in different ways as dictated, not by how information works, but by what the latest state-of-the-art whiz-bang requires. How information works is only superficially considered. The IT mind-set focuses on and is in turn severely limited by technical artificiality instead of informational reality. As technology evolved informability got worse. GUI (Graphic User Interface) and color rather than monochrome displays do nothing to enhance information development. They arguably improve the presentation of information, but not its development or organization ... its meaning. They are consumer appliances not information tools/technology. They do nothing to improve informability. When network and internet capability allowed many different people to gain remote access to a computer not everyone cooperated. Because the original purpose was to provide easy technical access, operating software had inadvertently become something like a bus with a steering wheel, brake, and accelerator installed at every seat. Some hitch-hiking passengers would quite gleefully seize control, crashing a computer-bus with a computer virus. In response, easy access to technical capability had to be selectively undone. Some people would get it, others would not. But, with a legacy purpose of making technical access easy for everyone, access control was difficult. The new reality contradicted the old expediency. And no one noticed that neither the demands of the new Solving the new reality looked something like putting a bank vault door on the OS corral. Good-guys dutifully struggled through the heightened security while savvy bad-guys slid in between the fence rails. Ever increasing vigilance became imperative ... and costly. IT customers got the dubious privilege of paying for informational incapability three times: once by having to buy sickly, virus prone, non-informational operating software, the second time by paying to protect sickly technology, and finally for the costs of recovery when infected. The distraction of protecting computers from hostile Overwhelmed by technical complexity, we don't pay attention to what's really going on.
The cost and frustration came with no functional benefit to the user and even some functional back-sliding thrown in for good measure. Why? To stay "technically current" as dictated by the software publisher, not by the user's need. Many organizations have found themselves being forced into replacing systems for no functional benefits because a vendor discontinues production and thus support of some or all of the operating platform on which the system stood.
Informational needs ... an information-trip ... shouldn't change just because the vehicle-platform changes. But with conventional information management it does because that's the way IT practitioners want it irrespective of what might work best for end users ... for the people footing the bill. Contributing to the problem are two strange concepts. One is that function and program are synonymous. We don't have to have programs as we are accustomed to thinking of them in order to achieve improved information functionality. The second is that software has to be installed on computers. You can get a lot of technical reasons why this is so, but everyone of those technical reasons is based on how technologists have arbitrarily chosen to view technology ... and ignore informability. There never has been a legitimate technical or functional reason for installing and thus tying a program to a specific computer. But we do it this way because the technical mind-set can't get out of the way.
The problem is IT people pick the topics. They pick the wrong ones. There is no doubt IT practitioners know exactly what they're talking about, what they don't understand is that, where information management is concerned, what they're talking about has very little to do with what IT customers actually need. The people creating operating software are at least three steps removed from the real world. They never get into a live-fire information management situation, and, in fact, have no intention of solving information management problems. They are tool-makers, creating tools for tool-user IT practitioners to presumably solve information management problems. Whether or not the tools actually work for this purpose is never verified. Tool-user IT practitioners owe their position to knowing how to use the tool, not to knowing how to use information. Want ads for tool-user positions ask for someone trained in specific technology, not for knowledge and skill with information. In consequence, solutions are ultimately designed around technology not information. The never-ending debate over which platform is best, is an essentially pointless discussion. It is an exercise in deciding which operating software is going to be used to manage information poorly.
The mind-set dynamic that has evolved between IT tool-makers and tool-users and their mutual interdependency makes it extraordinarily difficult to directly address information management. Each assumes the necessity of their co-dependent duality without realizing that what they're doing is the problem, not the solution. Neither individually nor together do they make a complete job of it. Information possibilities and potential and the best interests of would-be system beneficiaries are virtually excluded in the name of computer literacy. Computer innovation simply for the sake of computer innovation will never get it right.
No matter the vendor, all operating systems are in the same class. They are technology based. Solving information management problems requires changing the legacy standard of relying on technology based operating software to creating information based operating software.
Changing from technology to information based operating software:
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