I am sitting in a small town called Lonavla, India, up in the Sahayadri hills, with my N900 and reading people's reaction on the recent decision of Nokia to go with the Windows platform for their smartphones.
I am no pundit to predict the future, nor do I want to go into how good or bad this is. There are plenty of people and sites that are already making an attempt at that.
What I know for sure is that in spite of the many platform wars that have come and gone, today we have more platforms than ever. In some way or the other rather than being obliterated as the pundits predict they coexist with the others. As a quick test of this observation I just typed in DOS in google and came up with the FreeDos project amongst others - DOS the second platform I started coding for (the first was on my ZX Spectrum+ m/c) is still around and being developed :)
The mobile space alone seems to be adding up platforms faster with each passing year. Without going into the philosophical debate of why and if these platforms are needed what is sure is that they exist, will always exist, each platform has its own software ecosystem - it's own island and software alien to that island is not welcome. This is the state of technology.
On the human and end-user side, most people don't care of software and platform (did I actually say that? :) ), they have functionality in mind. They simply want to write a document, or play a game, send an email, etc.
While each ecosystem may have functionality to do many of the common tasks, sometimes the best tool for the job is simply on a different platform. Other times someone may simply prefer to use media editing tools for the Mac but love his collection of games on Windows. Even within the same platform you may need some esoteric functionality you don't have software for like a midnight craving to try a different food :)
As platforms increase, as functionality required by people increases, it is clear to me that the residents of every island need to be better connected with each other and also need a bridge to connect them to every other island......this is what we hope eBrainPool will do.
Of course every bridge needs people to walk over it, to build it too.....we need you :)