Operating Systems in use today include the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, Over 350 distros of Linux, SunOS,BSD and variants, Netware, DEC UNIX/VAX/VMS, Network Computing, IBM UN/A(IX) and some few others.

In Desktop, the major contenders are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distros. The pendulum keeps swinging and new technology bringing about new innovations. What are the Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and Threats these OS will experience will surface in the next major release of OS to be released in 2009.


Mac OS X has delivered a lot of innovative new features and is rising up With Snow Leopard, the next major version of its line of operating system.
Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard, builds on Leopard’s enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X.Apple is marketing the idea of there being “no new features” for Snow Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X works under the hood.

According to Apple's website features include

Microsoft Exchange Support
Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal.

Multicore
“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors.

64-bit
To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to advanced hardware, Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today.

Media and Internet
Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, a streamlined, next-generation platform that advances modern media and Internet standards. QuickTime X features optimized support for modern codecs and more efficient media playback, making it ideal for any application that needs to play media content
OpenCL
Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing


Other features include (geek's site)
ZFS support, portions of which come from the OpenSolaris project (along with Sun’s DTrace technology, which Apple uses in its Instruments performance profiling tool). Leopard debuted read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will provide both read and write support for Sun’s new 128-bit file system. ZFS was designed to provide “simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability


Microsoft’s Application Features in Mac OS X, System Wide.
Microsoft’s business model of tacking on features hasn’t been a total wash. The company’s desperate efforts to invent novel marketing features for every new release of Windows and Office have pioneered a number of ideas that have later found their way into Mac OS X. One example is the idea of Fast User Switching, which Apple added to Panther. Windows XP pioneered the trick, but built it upon the kluge that is Terminal Services. Ajax web apps and Other Apps which are still kept silent.

Think Small.
Snow Leopard aims below the bloat to accommodate the coming wave of SSD-based systems.Smaller apps.



From the stable of Microsoft, Windows 7 will address current computing needs such as

Windows 7 will pioneer advances in touch, speech, and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, and kernel improvements.
• Multi-touch gestures in photogalleries like two-finger zoom, flicking, and panning. Think of the photo app on the Microsoft Surface table.
• Multi-touch paint program where you can draw with 10 fingers
• Multi-touch piano app
• In-depth mapping application that pulls from Microsoft's Live Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth
For developers, Windows 7 includes a new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code
At WinHEC 2008 Microsoft announced that color depths of 30-bit and 48-bit would be supported in Windows 7 along with the wide color gamut scRGB (which for HDMI 1.3 can be converted and output as xvYCC). The video modes supported in Windows 7 are 16-bit sRGB, 24-bit sRGB, 30-bit sRGB, 30-bit with extended color gamut sRGB, and 48-bit scRGB.

It is speculated that this OS will be a linux-killer when it comes to netbooks and Nettops.

Linux major distributions includes Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mint, Fedora, PCLinux, Debian, Slackware, mandriva and gentoo are giving out what they can give free and provide support to the extext possible. All with major new releases are serving as alternatives for desktop users and forshunately or unforshunately eating into their hearts.

Bros wetin bi the source?