I agree. With the exception of the Linux desktop, desktop computing is controlled by two very large companies: Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft still makes plen

I agree. With the exception of the Linux desktop, desktop computing is controlled by two very large companies: Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft still makes plenty of money from Windows licenses, but its business model has become more reliant on its cloud offerings. 15 years ago Apple was virtually synonymous with the Mac, but today the iOS platform far outstrips the Mac in terms of revenue. Back when there was money to be made selling personal computers, we got innovation. But now that Apple is making tons of money from its iPhone/iPad ecosystem and Microsoft is increasingly becoming a cloud vendor, innovation on the desktop has stagnated, in my opinion. Moreover, the desktop is a very difficult market to enter. Writing a new desktop environment that is competitive with even Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard is going to take a lot of work, even if they piggyback on existing operating systems such as Linux in order to avoid the full work of writing a new operating system. Moreover, where is there a viable business model for selling desktop operating systems? Be, Inc. tried with BeOS in the 1990s; the company had a hard time getting PC companies to agree to shipping their PCs with BeOS preinstalled due to agreements these companies had with Microsoft regarding preinstalling Windows. There's also the problem with software incompatibility, though, interestingly enough, this may be less of an issue today than it was in the 1990s due to the dominance of the Web and due to the "Electronization" of desktop applications. My opinion is such innovation on the desktop will come from a hobbyist open-source project or from a small business that is willing to cater to a niche of users who want compelling alternatives to Microsoft, Apple, and various Linux desktops.