Impending Disaster
In light of Microsoft (MS) ending its Windows XP support, a voice is being raised that an alternative Operating System (OS) is needed and a consensus is forming that we should no longer depend on one particular OS.
Then, would using another OS solve the problem?
On April 4, an average company worker spent his work day using Apple’s Mac OS instead of Windows. At 8:30 am, he turned on his Macbook Air with Apple’s Mac OS installed on it.
Since his job involves a lot of outings, he logged onto his company messenger the first thing in the morning.
However, his company messenger does not have a Mac OS version, making it impossible to install it on a Macbook Air. Luckily it had an iPhone application. But the relief was brief.
He had to report today’s itinerary and other issues via messenger, but it was awfully inconvenient to send long messages using the tiny keyboard on his iPhone. But he had no choice, so he hunkered down to deliver the long messages.
At 10 am, he was one hour behind schedule due to using the phone instead of his desktop messenger and wasting time trying to install programs.
Another obstacle presented itself when he was trying to access the article release system, which only was designed to work on Windows, making it impossible to install on Mac OS. He had to email all the articles to another worker who had to upload them to the company system.
At 2 p.m., he started a web search to look for article data via the Safari Browser instead of MS Internet Explorer, but the domestic web environment was not friendly to the former.
For example, Minwon 24, much used by the general population, showed a lot of errors when accessed via the Safari web browser instead of Internet Explorer. Only a certain version of Safari can access that web site.
At 4 p.m., he tried to install programs he usually used under Windows OS. When trying to download free antivirus programs such as AhnLab’s V3 Lite and ESTsoft’s Al Yac, again he was let down because they only supported Windows OS. After the 10 hour experiment, he realized that working with anther OS other than Windows was not impossible, but entailed a lot of inconveniences and would negatively affect other people’s jobs. The problem was not just the OS. His work environment was not friendly to other OS systems than Windows.
The problem is shared by domestic public organizations and most companies. For example, Korean civil servants in public organizations mainly use the On-Nara BPS system, which only works with Windows OS. If an alternative OS were to be installed, as the government insists, it would only wreak havoc on daily operation. The work environment has to be changed together with the change in the OS.
This is why experts point out the need to change the current Windows-predominant domestic system, amid the debate over finding an alternative OS.
Mirae Labs CEO Cho Man-young, currently working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is a global organization for web standardization, says, “In Europe and some developing nations where Microsoft products are too expensive, there has been a steady debate over using an alternative OS such as Linux since the mid 2000s, and some countries came up with solutions. It is good that Korea is keen on finding an alternative OS, but simply changing the OS will not solve all the problems. We need to look into changing the work environment where various OS systems could work.”