How Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu are slowly turning your PC into a smartphone

“Consumers are mainly driven by simplicity and familiarity,” says Carolina Milanesi, Gartner’s research vice president of consumer technology.

In a word, people yearn for consistency. And as the industry struggles to satisfy that demand, mobile design is bleeding over to the desktop—though the Big Three PC operating systems are approaching the convergence in drastically different ways.

“Microsoft’s philosophy is ‘Okay, we want to be consistent across our operating systems,’ and the way it worked in their brains was to just make one,” says Ben Bajarin, the director of consumer technology at Creative Strategies. “Whereas Apple said, ‘Well, we’ll make two [operating systems], but we’re going to have gestures and some UI consistencies [across iOS and OS X] so that you have a consistent experience.’”

READ MORE HERE