Will There Be Life After Windows?

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

The consumer mobile device market has seen a proliferation of new OS platforms, but the rugged, enterpriseclass mobile computer space is still primarily a Windows world. The rugged market has occasionally experimented with other platforms, but so far, there hasn't been any widespread movement to adopt a competing platform. "Customers and the ecosystem supporting the enterprise have a big investment in applications built on Microsoft technologies," says Suhas Uliyar, chief solutions architect at Motorola Solutions. "Enterprise customers have some very specific and unique OS requirements — from security to device lifecycle management and beyond. There is no compelling reason for these customers to bear the high cost of change in the immediate future to migrate their applications, security, and management infrastructure to other operating systems."