While the open-source crowd gets (rightly) excited by Linux's growing market share, three companies are pulling the rug out from under the feet of traditional operating systems.

Red Hat is winning in Linux while IBM cleans up the Unix market. But those are increasingly yesterday's markets as Microsoft, Google, and VMware create different breeds of operating system, each tuned to the strength of its product portfolio.

The easiest to understand are Google and VMware. Google, with its Linux distribution Chrome OS, is placing secondary emphasis on the operating system and primary emphasis on where it takes you: the Web. Given Google's strength in cloud computing, this makes perfect sense. Google needs an operating system just long enough to move users "off" their personal computers (or mobile phones, for which Google has developed Android) and into its cloud services: Google Apps, Search, Wave, etc.

While Google won't find this strategy to be easy, it has the brand and expertise to bring "desktop" substance to cloud applications.

Similarly, VMware's vSphere attempts to untether computing from "desktops" and on-premises servers

More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10315586-16.html