Right, too bad no one here considers marketing until after they have something to market..... (Why is this brought up???)
If you want marketing to be successful, usually they demand control from the very beginning. Look at all well marketed products.
So you prefer an arch that does not cater to the end user? (On ARM you still have to care about differet devices, look at the HTC Evo vs. the HTC One+, there is a gigantic difference in hardware. But because you are targeting ARM you don't have to query the hardware to figure out what you have to deal with.......wait.....)
Theres no reason to have to query if your target device has consistent hardware. Cellphones also have a very strong software market. Now, say the pi or maple boards... Now if you can make a sticky note replacement device for under 80 USD, now you've got something since most are well over 100 usd. It's a real bonus if yours can save to multiple notes. Looking on amazon right now, i noticed that the no saving monochrome single page chalk boards came down since i last looked at them. That's just one of many, many examples of things you could do, because althoguh there are hundreds of "personal data banks" out there, it's only for name, phone number and maybe address or email address. You might even be lucky enough to find one that allows you to store a 100 letter note about someone. Give it something like that a wifi hookup and you don't need a cellphone with texting for all the traveling salesmen (and companies surely don't like having those huge cellphone bills [or perhaps extra curricular activity on their bills]). And that's only 1 idea, and a very marketable idea.
Another would be to give TI a run for their money, because everyone knows TI is overpriced and uses ancient technology.
You could try looking into personal security. Perhaps even "parent alarms" which could hook up to a windows, mac, or linux computer and automatically hide certain windows (though this has a very limited age group if you market it as that [you could also apply the reverse to warn parents that their kids might walk in on them, but even that has only a marginally higher market value]).
If you know a little bit about circuitry, you could also invest in pet detectors as well, which alot of people worry about. How about some automatic sensors that track where you are and turn lights on and off for you? The sky's the limit if you can hook this thing up to something. All you need is a working demo and the right audience, and you could turn a home design project into something out of star trek. Surely you'll have some competition, but your competiton probably prices very high due to the small market: so make it affordable and many will talk with you.
That's very close minded, and insulting. (Not to say that I am going to write the next killer OS) But that no one from here could be the next Linus (Assuming you are refering to linux.)
Even the wiki states about as much. Even if we can be awesome developers and make the best OS we can, that doesn't mean we have a fighting chance.
What else would you use a computer for? (I can think of many reasons.....namely gaming, the market Valve has on lock espicially with their linux port of Steam. What is your idea of another use {that other systems don't cover}?)
Gaming is also covered by it's own big 3, but you can use gaming as a bonus for another device.
Do tell...
There's alot in our lives that could be automated for us, especially if we could get full control of the automation process. Heck, make a cheapo addon for a toilet so a regular toilet can be fitted with automatic flushing and you'll just find some cheap money there.
UEFI offers much more standardization of boot level services. And given that, and what you said, why the heck are you asking about how to drop back to Real Mode???
Read the original purpose of my kernel: it doesn't have to be spectacular. I only hope that the flicker is mostly gone for my OS in emulators like QEMU by the time the bios is dropped. I probably just have to lower the refresh rate if it's not.
I think kohlrak has billions of dollars, and is planning on spending all that cash on marketing in an attempt to convince end users that all of the problems caused by the "relying on BIOS code intended for booting only" OS are actually hardware problems and not software problems.
Actually for MY kernel here, i don't need money for my marketing. I already have a small audience waiting for it, with a small audience to follow in the future whom will hear an explanation of the potential problems before they happen anyway. The ones who would be interested in this kernel should already have the intelligence level necessary to compensate or deal with them.