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Q4-3 What Do Business Professionals Need to Know About Software?

Q4-3 What Do Business Professionals Need 161
to Know About Software?

Operating systems can become As a future manager or business professional, you need to know the essential terminology and
infected with malware. Read the software concepts that will enable you to be an intelligent software consumer. To begin, consider
Security Guide on pages 184–185 the basic categories of software shown in Figure 4-9.
to learn more.
Every computer has an operating system (OS), which is a program that controls that com-
puter’s resources. Some of the functions of an operating system are to read and write data, allocate
main memory, perform memory swapping, start and stop programs, respond to error conditions,
and facilitate backup and recovery. In addition, the operating system creates and manages the user
interface, including the display, keyboard, mouse, and other devices.
Although the operating system makes the computer usable, it does little application-spe-
cific work. If you want to check the weather or access a database, you need application pro-
grams such as an iPad weather application or Oracle’s customer relationship management
(CRM) software.
Both client and server computers need an operating system, though they need not be the
same. Further, both clients and servers can process application programs. The application’s design
determines whether the client, the server, or both process it.
You need to understand two important software constraints. First, a particular version of an
operating system is written for a particular type of hardware. For example, Microsoft Windows
works only on processors from Intel and companies that make processors that conform to the Intel
instruction set (the commands that a CPU can process). With other operating systems, such as
Linux, many versions exist for many different instruction sets.
Second, two types of application programs exist. Native applications are programs that
are written to use a particular operating system. Microsoft Access, for example, will run only on
the Windows operating system. Some applications come in multiple versions. For example, there
are Windows and Macintosh versions of Microsoft Word. But unless you are informed otherwise,
assume that a native application runs on just one operating system. Native applications are some-
times called thick-client applications.
A Web application (also known as a thin-client application) is designed to run within a com-
puter browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Edge (formerly Internet Explorer). Web applica-
tions run within the browser and can run on any type of computer. Ideally, a Web application can
also run within any browser, though this is not always true as you will learn.
Consider next the operating system and application program categories of software.
What Are the Major Operating Systems?

The major operating systems are listed in Figure 4-10. Consider each.

Nonmobile Client Operating Systems

Nonmobile client operating systems are used on personal computers. The most popular is
Microsoft Windows. Some version of Windows resides on more than 85 percent of the world’s
desktops, and, if we consider just business users, the figure is more than 95 percent. The most

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Categories of Computer Software