Are Operating Systems Doomed?
Found this in my Infoworld feed this morning. Are Operating Systems Doomed.
The new philosophy of application development is making the traditional OS irrelevant, but what are the implications for enterprise IT?
The author speaks about Google Chrome and Adobe Air as changing the landscape of application development, to be OS independent. To be honest I do not see this as a big surprise. My question is why has it taken this long?
I would love to use Chrome, but the good folks at Google have not decided to let Mac OS X users in on the party. Something that continues to urk me as Google CEO Eric Schmit sits on the board at Apple. Rant on the subject: No Chrome for Mac or Linux Users. So until Google decided to put all that money and developer power into making all Google goodness available to Windows AND Mac and Linux users, I am seeing a hole in this progress. Adobe Air is a different story entirely. They support Windows, Linux and Mac. And guess what, there are tons of apps being developed, and more importantly, used by a growing community. So Google Developers, a word of advice; lets start seeing a systems requirements page like this for all Google applications and services (Adobe Air Systems Requirements).
Now for the comments on enterprise IT, and possibly security, in my humble opinion, they continue to drag their feet and find ways to keep their jobs. Consumer technology is the ‘only’ place there is ‘any’ inovation in the IT world. Even virtualization, which has been the hot technology in IT for the last couple of years got it start with consumers in the late 90s. Virtualization has run into the say foot dragging from IT Security and monolithic IT departments wanting to keep doing things the same way. I mean we just have companies wrapping their mind around instant messaging, and only recently have they started to embrace wiki technology. How many of you reading this that work in corporate IT, have a 100MB-250MB cap on your email via Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. While Google is providing the world ~7GB of mail storage with better uptime than most corporate IT departments, for free. For $50/per user/per year, you can get the same for your company. So why is corporate IT, buying and maintaining servers in datacenters and IT salaries for 1990s class services?
I read an article on a magazine last month that talked about the future where companies would stop providing computers and mobile phones in the same way as they stopped providing clothing expenses back in the 50s. Basically it was saying that everyone will have a computer and a mobile phone and all they will need is a way to connect to their data. To do this future the above are the baby steps.
For those that know me, I have and always will be a bit of a computer geek. You just cannot beat it out of me with a stick. Even now that I have taken a position in management and using a Mac, I have still not stopped geeking out once in a while. However, the days of requiring a rack of computers to install the latest beta version of Microsoft OS, Active Directory, Exchange or open source Linux distribution or server application are probably gone. Although I have fond memories of those days, and miss being the guy in the room that technically knows more about the latest and greatest things than anyone else in the room, I have moved on – life goes on. So leaving that era of my life behind, I no longer need a so-called ‘server room’. All of the servers have been shutdown, all the data wiped. I have gone from a potential rack of 8 live servers, plus a bench for assemble and disassembly to one office with three computers. No longer do I have a working Active Directory domain with DNS, DHCP, active mail servers for web front ends, custom router/firewall systems, private instant messaging servers or hardware RAID enabled file servers. On August 11th, 2008, it all came down. Now to be realistic, most of it has not been powered up for the past two years…but that is beside the point – it was still in the room ready to be powered up.
