> From: "Geo." 
> "Adam Flinton"  wrote in message
> news:403b0318$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>> Other than that, if you want to run KDE apps you'll have to have kde/qt
>> on baord, if you want to run gnome apps you'll have to have gnome on
>> board etc.
> The market tends to gravitate towards a monopoly situation. As that happens
> one will emerge as "the one"..

Possibly. However I'm not sure you're correct anymore. The world is
becoming in many ways more hetergeneous wrt computing than it was. You now
have PDA'es which are more powerfull than old PC'es. You now have mobile
phones which are getting that powerfull. However what is a great GUI for a
17" high res monitor may not be a good GUI for a dinky little
Mobilephone/PDA screen.

i.e. you view would dictate that the same OS/GUI was used from PDA to mainframe
& I'm not sure that is ever going to be the case.

> I'll give you an example you may like better. Lets say JAVA becomes real
> popular and the vast bulk of apps become cross platform via JAVA. Suddenly
> the end users find the only importance for the OS now is which OS runs JAVA
> better and pretty soon everyone is running that OS.

Hummm..again consider that a fair few mobile phones come with Java. However
the GUI toolkit ain't swing as it's too big for small devices so the KVM
/J2ME UI is different even though it's all still "java". Also
consider that if that were to come to pass, would you care what the
underlying compiled to the metal OS was? Symbian? Linux? WinNT family? Why
would you care? It then comes down to h/w support & speed &
availability etc.

> Well the GUI shell is like that. One will emerge as the standard, takes a
> little time but it will happen.

I don't see it. 

It's like Bash vs ksh vs csh etc. In accordance with your theory by now
there should only be one & yet each carries on quite happily. It's also
a big diff with the proprietary products vs the OSS ones. The proprietary
product costs a given comp money to produce, improve support etc. However
the OSS guys do it coz they want to so even though they may only have a
fraction of a % of the GUI market they really don't care.

Adam

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