There are shap­ing up to be four big ecosys­tems in com­put­ing. As all four diver­sify into the cat­e­gories below, I’m notic­ing that a lot of users are stan­dard­iz­ing on using every­thing from a sin­gle ven­dor, a silo­ing of the mar­ket rather than embrac­ing vari­ety. You can do nearly every­thing you need to do with offer­ings from any one of them, and they tend to work bet­ter if you don’t mix and match. But is it really pos­si­ble to put all your eggs in one basket?

Microsoft

Microsoft has, by far, the best selec­tion of the bunch, with every sin­gle cat­e­gory I could think of cov­ered. They have gone out of their way to pro­vide solu­tions for the office, liv­ing room and on the go. Some of the options here aren’t best-​in-​class (though I’d say the Zune is bet­ter than the iPod clas­sic and IE 8 can give Fire­fox and Chrome a run for their money if you give it chance), but they all work. And more impor­tantly, they all work together. If you use the soft­ware and ser­vices listed above, they inter­op­er­ate cleanly and effi­ciently, exactly the way con­ven­tional wis­dom says Microsoft doesn’t do. The biggest prob­lem Microsoft has is the snarky haters who have their minds made up and won’t give them a break.

Google

Google has a lot of gaps in their ecosys­tem offer­ings, but they make up for it with even bet­ter inte­gra­tion than Microsoft. Once you start using one Google prod­uct (Gmail seems to be the most pop­u­lar “gate­way drug” aside from search itself), it’s all too easy to start using the rest. But where Google wins in inter­op­er­abil­ity, they lose in power. Google Docs, for exam­ple, is fine for light use, but most users wouldn’t think of using it to com­pletely replace a more pow­er­ful desk­top office suite. Google also lacks an OS and vir­tu­ally any enter­tain­ment options. Even Google’s Android plat­form offers only the most basic media playback.

Apple

For Apple, inter­op­er­abil­ity is king, but it comes at the cost of choice. Apple’s offer­ings work seam­lessly together, often appear­ing to be one organic sys­tem, but heaven help you if you need to replace one of them because it doesn’t entirely meet your needs. Their gaps are fairly minor, and the lock-​in pro­vided by iTunes over portable media and home the­ater offer­ings keeps a lot of users in their camp.

Linux/​Open Source

The open source route is for the free spir­its out there who so don’t want to be in thrall to one com­pany that they’re will­ing to cob­ble together every­thing them­selves, even when it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily even try to work together. Think of these as the polar oppo­sites to the Apple users. A lot of this stuff is build your own, but at least most of it doesn’t require you to com­pile it your­self any­more. It’s also so frag­mented between dif­fer­ent Linux dis­tros (KDE and Gnome both have their own photo man­agers, and there are oth­ers as well if you don’t like those), that any kind of consensus-​based inter­op­er­abil­ity is unlikely.

Con­clu­sions, my ecosystem

I tried to stay within a sin­gle ecosys­tem, and my life would prob­a­bly be eas­ier if I did. But because of the var­i­ous gaps or miss­ing func­tion­al­ity, I’ve been forced to mix and match a bit, fully know­ing that that would be up to me to find my own ways to makes the pieces interoperate.

Most of my ecosys­tem is based on Microsoft offer­ings, but I’ve swapped out a bit from the Google and Open Source stacks where appro­pri­ate. Fire­fox per­forms bet­ter on my net­book than IE 8, and the IE Tab plu­gin allows me to use the IE ren­der­ing engine when I need it. Google Talk is lighter and less noisy than Live Mes­sen­ger, and I find Google’s search results a lit­tle bit more reli­able than Live Search’s. My blog­ging solu­tion is also a three-​headed mon­ster with some quick posts done in Live Writer but most of my blog­ging done in OneNote for early drafts, and then Word for post­ing. I’ve also bypassed Zune in favor of Win­dows Media Player and my Win­dows Mobile smart­phone, but I know peo­ple that use both.

What are your choices? Do you stick mostly to a sin­gle ven­dor, or do you play the field?