What do Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) have in common? Well, whether you are aware of it or not, all three companies are striving to dominate the platforms that we use on a daily basis. You see, while the battle to be the dominant operating system (OS) on the desktop has long been resolved, the bid to be the operating platform of the future has only just begun.

This time around, winning is no longer measured by how many copies are sold of the software that controls your desktop computer. Far wider in scope, the platform war is literally about winning the hearts and minds of the masses with the devices and services that they use. Be it a laptop, smartphone, tablet or a music-player with PDA-like capabilities, the battle has begun to capture the market share of as many millions of users as possible.

In fact, Steve Jobs himself confirmed this when he tore down the distinction between "phone" or "music player" at WWDC on Monday, rebranding the operating environment powering the iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone simply as the "iOS 4." And Apple is on track, said Jobs, to ship the 100 millionth iOS device "by the end of this month."

Technical capabilities versus market share

Anyone remember the BeOS, an OS that was developed by a company called Be Inc in the 1990s? Created to be superlative in digital media work and based on modern GUI design principles, BeOS sported a pervasive multi-threaded design that spans all the way from the kernel to the file system; it was created to thrive on multiple CPUs.

I remembered how I got hold of a free copy of BeOS in 1999, and gave it a spin on my desktop rig. The OS booted up in nine seconds on my (hacked) dual 450MHz Celeron processor rig off a standard hard disk drive--an amazing boot-up speed which was only broken recently with Windows 7 on a much faster processor and a solid state drive. With its 64-bit, journaling file system, the BeOS could only be described as, "ahead of its time."  (To put things in perspective, Windows 98 SE came out in May 1999.)

Fast forward to 2010 however, and you see the Windows operating system as the predominant desktop OS on the planet. What happened to BeOS? Well, Wikipedia says that "it was ultimately unable to achieve a significant market share and proved commercially unviable for Be Inc."

You see, technical capabilities don't guarantee success; market share plays a crucial role.

Jockeying for the lead

Google's strategy is clear: It wants in on everything that is web-based, and has worked tirelessly to create a meticulous ecology of cloud-based applications. Platforms that are tied to services it hosts are also of interest to the company, which explains the developing of the Chrome OS, and less directly, the Android platform.

On the other hand, Apple wants its iOS to be the distribution point for all digital goods. It has done an excellent job so far with the App Store and iTunes, which are indisputable market leaders. And yes, the iBook Store for distributing digital books will come to the iPhone soon and before long, you can expect digitally signed extensions for the Safari web browser too. 

Adobe doesn't really care what the device is, as long as it gets to run Flash on it. Rebuffed by Apple's refusal to allow Flash onto the Apple iOS, Adobe is nevertheless confident that Flash will run on 250 million smartphones by 2012.

So where does this leave Microsoft?

In light of these developments, where does this leave Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), still the largest software company in the world. The Redmond-based company has attempted to replicate the products and services of its competitors on multiple fronts, intent on gaining a slice of everything. But Microsoft could hardly be called a market leader in most of the previously mentioned areas.

Its endeavors include: A free webmail service with Hotmail (Gmail?), the redesigned Bing search engine (Google Search?), a web-based Office (Google Apps?) and a plug-in called Silverlight (Flash?). And of course, Microsoft is involved in the mobile arena with a rewritten mobile OS (iPhone?), and it has also created the software for a music player (iPod?) too. 

If anything, Microsoft still bears substantial clout, and has sold over 100 million licenses within the first six months that Windows 7 was launched. For now, I would say that Microsoft is still very much in the platform game, except that it has got to move a lot faster--or risk being deemed irrelevant by innovations originating from the likes of Google and Apple. - Paul Mah (Twitter @paulmah)