The Web Will Commoditize Windows
The Disappearing Operating System and the Web Interchange Format
The operating system will be a commodity within the next ten years. Web applications will be top dog but only if they can seamlessly exchange data without user help.
The world is moving towards the web. In the next five to ten years, applications will be online and the PC will become much simpler; just a screen with a mouse and keyboard and enough compute power to run a web browser. How will this affect the operating system and what are the implications of this for how people use web applications in the future?
Commoditizing the Operating System
The PC of the future will essentially be a web browser. It will have a very simple operating system (compared to Vista, Linux or Mac OS X) whose main job will be to consume services from the Internet. As the operating system will be simple, it will be small. A small operating system can be stored on a memory stick or downloaded at machine boot time from an internet service provider.
This will turn the operating system into a commodity. If a user needs a new operating system (OS), they can buy it for a couple of dollars from Amazon. It will be shipped on a memory stick or the user can download a new copy.
Information Becomes Operating-System Independent
The user will be able to reboot with a new operating system as easily as they can plug in a new memory stick. If the OS provider is from India, a user can simply swap to theirs. If Google subsequently release a better version of their OS with upgraded features, the user can easily change to this one.
Everything that is currently in a file on a desktop or laptop will be online. This makes information OS independent. What matters now is what the web browser can do and what features the web-application (such as a word processor) makes available. All of the complexity (such as data backup) is inside the web-application, hidden from the user, their local computer and mobile devices.
Work Online all the Time
There would be no more viruses as they would all be stopped inside the web-application. There would be no need for laptops as the simplicity of the local computer means they could be provided everywhere for a fraction of the price of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computer. The user would configure this public computer simply by plugging in their memory stick.
Computing is moving in this direction. It is already possible to work entirely online. There are many websites with word processing, spreadsheets and project management software (zoho.com) as well as email and file storage. Each company entices users by offering a comprehensive suite of applications (zoho.com offers 17). But this requires users to put all of their content into a single system, which they do not want to do as this restricts them to a single provider.
Internet Information Interchange Format Required
Internet users need to exchange data between systems as they tend to have accounts with many web systems or they may need to exchange data with a colleague who uses a different web application. This is currently done by exporting the data from one system into a format the second system can import. It would be preferable if the two web applications could exchange the data directly, without having to get any users involved.
Information can be exchanged in this way by defining a standard interchange format. Web companies would be free to use whatever internal format they wanted to, but when exchanging data with another company, the application’s data would be translated into the standard format. This would be hidden from the user as the translation would be performed by the two web applications. Today, a user has to be involved, copying the file to their computer and then manually importing to the other system. It is preferable to move the complexity into the web, simplifying the OS, turning the OS into a commodity.
Commoditizing the operating system is a huge change for the computing industry and not something that Microsoft would like to see. However, the web redefines which software is important and makes data operating system independent. The next challenge is to ensure that the world’s web-applications can work together to provide users with a completely seamless experience.
