2009-11-05

Cross-platform solutions

Recently when searching the internet for platform-independent solutions for particular requirements I got annoyed and angry about what people write on their websites. It seams that they mostly do not understand what cross-platform means.

In many cases software vendors who offer a tool or solution for Windows and Mac find that sufficient to call it a cross-platform thing. My opinion: This is pretty poor for labeling it "cross-platform". If you look at Wikipedia for instance you can see not only Windows and Mac, but also all kind of Linuxes (and there is really a lot - see distrowatch.com) including widely used Ubuntu/Debian, Redhat/Fedora or Solaris or BSD or ... (well we skip DOS, Amiga and the like here ;-) ).

So: Cross-platform is NOT just Windows and Mac! At least the major distributions of Linux should be also included in the list of supported platforms!

I simply cannot consider a software that is just running on Windows and Mac as being cross-platform... - Those vendors should write: "Blablabla - for Windows AND Mac!" instead of "Blablabla - cross-platform solution!".

Related posts: Why Linux?, Why I switched to Ubuntu, Going Linux, New year's IT resolutions.

No comments: