Operating Systems
Three properties, three pairs, and the centre is empty.
Three desirable properties as circles. Each operating system occupies a pair of them. The centre, where all three meet, is labelled you wish.
Three circles overlap in the standard arrangement. The top one is user friendly. The lower left is stable. The lower right is customizable. Where two circles meet, an operating system is named: Mac OS above left, Windows above right, Linux below. Where all three meet, in the small central region, the label reads: you wish.
The empty centre is the whole diagram
This is one of the few plates in the archive that uses a Venn diagram for the thing a Venn diagram is actually for. A Venn diagram, unlike an Euler diagram, draws every possible intersection whether or not anything lives there. Most people who reach for the form only want the overlaps that are populated, which is why most Venn diagrams online are Euler diagrams wearing the wrong name.
Here the unpopulated region is the payload. The chart cannot make its point without drawing a space that exists, is clearly labelled, and contains no product. Remove the centre and you have three systems with two virtues each, which is a description. Draw the centre and leave it empty and you have an argument: the combination is available in the geometry and not in the market.
The structure is borrowed from the older engineering formulation, fast, cheap or good, pick two. That version is a sentence. This one is a picture, and the picture is stronger because the reader locates the missing option themselves rather than being told it is missing.
The assignments in the three overlaps are, of course, exactly what nobody agrees on. Windows filed as customizable rather than stable, Mac OS as stable rather than customizable, Linux excluded from user friendly: each is a position that had partisans in 2009 and still does. The chart is confident enough to pick, and picking is what generated the discussion.
Where it travelled
Straight into the technical communities it was describing, and then abroad.
The TechExams forum, a certification community, ran a thread on it under the title “Chart Describing 3 Major OSes”. Geeks Are Sexy posted it plainly as “Operating Systems Venn Diagram”. Gizmodo Japan carried it under a headline that translates as “the OS we really want”, crediting GraphJam and a reader called Eric for the tip, which puts the plate in front of a large audience with no shared vocabulary and no need for one.
The Spanish site Abadía Digital used it as a starting point, writing that GraphJam had produced a chart setting out the strengths and weaknesses, and then sent readers to the original post’s comments to argue about the assignments. Another Spanish writer pointed at the same comment thread for the same reason. The German blog of Dirk Deimeke reposted it, crediting GraphJam onward from a second German site.
That is the pattern for this plate everywhere: the chart gets posted, and then the discussion is about whether the three labels are in the right circles. It travels as a prompt rather than as a punchline.
What the plate is worth now
Two of the three products still exist under the same names, the third is more widely deployed than in 2009, and the argument about which one belongs in which overlap has never been settled. The empty centre has also survived intact. Nothing has since shipped that a majority would place in it.
Seven domains still link here, in four languages, and the most-linked of them is a certification forum rather than a humour site.