David Berlind’s recent post encapsulates many of my thoughts on the relationship between operating systems and the Internet:
More than anything else, operating systems are collections of APIs that make it so developers can do what once required thousands of lines of code with one line. Things like accessing the network or putting a window on screen (at a certain location with certain color scroll bars and a certain title). But to install an API into the general distribution of traditional operating system like Windows, the Mac, or even Linux requires the say-so of a handful of people. Not so with the Internet which, like operating systems, is also quickly turning into a collection of APIs (a good hunk of which are for Google’s applications). In fact, barely a day goes by where another API doesn’t show up on the Net — one that’s available to all developers. This is drawing developers in droves to the mashup ecosystem of software where they can draw upon multiple APIs from multiple sources to produce unique and innovative applications.
Toss in the cross-platform nature of those apps, since they run in a browser (which in turn means they run on any OS without modification) and, as McCracken points out, all the inequities between something like the Windows and Mac versions of Office go away. The traditional computer as we know it is simply becoming a point of access to our data and information. The naysayers who once hung their hat on the offline problem (as though it were insurmountable) now talk about how no one will store their data with a service because it’s too risky. Hackers could get at it or worse, some privacy invading court or Congress could require the service to turn over the data. (Who do you want defending your data — your lawyers or theirs?) Meanwhile, companies are flocking to services like Salesforce.com with the one dataset that’s their lifeblood: their customer data.
Sun was right (although it may not have been Sun that brought the vision across the finish line). The network is the computer. The uncomputer.
There is a lot of media attention paid to the relative market share of Windows, Macintosh and Linux. In my opinion, this is yesteday’s story.
The coming contest is amongst Internet-capable application platforms:
Although the runtimes are free, most of the associated tools and applications are not. We only have to remember how Microsoft, with its detailed knowledge of Window’s internals, was able to displace the establish leaders in office applications. This could be repeated in the Internet application space as well.
And the worldwide market is going to be enormous. According to Forrester, there will be one billion personal computers by the end of 2008 and more than two billion by 2015. These numbers, of course, do not include the much larger “non-PC” market for cellphones and other devices.
The people leading Microsoft, Apple and Sun understand the stakes involved very well. I expect the battle for the next platform standard to be extremely intense.
