It's not application development that is complementary to OS. It is the applications themselves.

Anyway, the point from Joel's article that I think so many people miss is that *every smart business should try to commoditize their complements". If you are an OS developer, you will try to commoditize you hardware, If you are an application developer, the smart thing is to commoditize your OS, and so on up the stack.

So, I don't understand the remark about Linux costing as much as Solaris. I am not expecting the final consumer to look at Windows and Linux and say "yeah, we need to pay for Linux". What I do believe is that smart application developers would never voluntarily lock themselves into a closed platform.

> If you are an OS developer, you will try to commoditize you hardware, If you are an application developer, the smart thing is to commoditize your OS, and so on up the stack.

Both applications and hardware are complementary to an OS.

So if you are an OS developer and are following this logic, you'll also try to commoditize the applications.

(And see eg the Apple app store for an illustration.)

Yes, you're right. The smart thing to do is to to commoditize up and down the stack.