The End of the Operating Systems War

I am old enough to remember a world before the web, when the most exciting Internet services were Gopher, WAIS, and LISTSERV.

I remember checking out the first few web pages at CERN and knowing right then and there that that new thing would blow everything out of the water.

And I was right.

Will I be right again?

I don’t know, but time will surely tell.

What’s my prediction now?

That eventually no one will care whether or not you’re running Windows or Mac OS X, or *NIX or whatever.

That eventually it simply won’t matter.

Because all your applications will be either online, or running in one OS independent form or another. Right now Java seems to be the one clear path in this direction, but all that’s subject to change at any moment. Virtualization and thin-client are two other possibilities worth noting too. What flavour of operating system or computer, or whether you use any computer at all, won’t matter a bit.

Things like web-based email, on-line office suites, and Internet available document storage systems are quickly making operating systems irrelevant right now. It really is only a matter of time.

Some examples?

Google Docs and Spreadsheets these days is a ‘good enough’ office suite that you can access from lots and lots of different web browsers. There’s debate and question as to whether my RAZR phone, or anyone’s eventual iPhone, will be able to access it, but if not Google now, then somebody else later. It’s such an obviously useful thing that it’s inevitable.

How about Microsoft SharePoint? It’s amazing! Now that the whole Microsoft 2007 world has been released, we’re seeing just the beginning of the sort of features and capabilities that are possible in this sphere. It’s quite staggering. From almost any web client, I can securely access all my company’s corporate files, any time I want. No Virtual Private Network, no weird hardware. Just a browser.

I remember Netscape 0.9N. That wasn’t such a big step away from IE7, or the web browser on my phone. Still within the same conceptual framework, just a richer feature set.

SharePoint and stuff like it will mature similarly, but at a much faster rate. There are far more desktop computers now than there were then, and people are wanting that sort of functionality on smaller and smaller devices, and are willing to pay for it. Follow the money and there’s your product!

Imagine being able to access your files anywhere at all, anywhere. Imagine having to organize things, of course, and having to have some sort of device and communication thingy too, but right now even, with planning and all the right bits, you can access your media library from the middle of the Kalahari, the depths of the Ross Ice Shelf, or the Space Shuttle. Not quickly, but you can. Now imagine that being faster. Imagine being able to run PhotoShop from your phone (thin client).

Anyhow, I’m still pretty impressed that I can access my email from my local coffee shop’s wifi point, or do serious MS CRM development on my servers at work off of my couch at home, doing the whole DSL/VPN/Parallels/RDC from my MacBook Pro. Being able to access my electronic life anywhere at anytime, whoa! We’re almost there now!

And we’ll eventually be able to do it without a keyboard or monitor, without any sort of device you can drop, crush, or lose on the bus. It’d be embedded in your skull maybe, and flash upgraded as needed. All very SciFi, maybe, but we’ll be there eventually.

For now, anyhow, things won’t be quite so drastic. Hadley Stern was right, however. The operating system is dead, almost.

Our so called OS Wars will end not because there was any clear cut eventual winner or loser, but because the technology itself outstripped everyone and made the whole debate meaningless.

I can hardly wait.