Virtualization Daily

It seems nobody loves the operating system these days. On one hand you have people saying the OS doesn’t matter.

If you can run Mac OS and Windows on the same machine and use whichever program you want, and drag data back and forth at will between the two, what does an operating system mean? In a sense, it just becomes a visual preference rather than a system or standards choice. And if you spend most of your time using Web apps, the operating system means even less. We’re not quite there yet, of course, but would such a world help Apple or Windows more?

And on the other, that the bloated general purpose OS is a thing of the past.

The first step is to get rid of the bloated, general purpose operating system. If you are a developer, your application is your avatar. Its characteristics are unique to the purpose you are attempting to serve with its existence. Its libraries, system functions, and resources should be uniquely crafted to fulfill its mission, without regard for the libraries and functions used by the avatar next door. In the virtual world, your avatar can live side by side with vastly different avatars with never a worry about a server crash associated with conflicts over shared resources.

And that seems to be the future. Virtualization, the virtual appliance concept and the changing application landscape are truly laying the groundwork for the OS to take a very different role going forward. It’s still going to exist, but the exact form will morph into something much simpler. This will happen with server based applications first, but it’s also looking more and more likely to emerge with desktop applications as well. Apple showed the way for this kind of thing with the Classic environment under Mac OS X, and now Parallels has picked up the reigns and brought similar functionality to enable running Windows application under Mac OS X. Things are moving rapidly and there’s a dramatic shift in the role of the OS coming. It won’t happen over night, but it’s going to be quite interesting to see where we are in another 10 years.

Now we find even more people chiming in on this same idea.

With computing power at the point it is now with 64 bit multicores being a commercially viable reality even for vanilla home users, it’s time to up the ante. Your computing experience and your applications should no longer be limited by your operating system. The operating system should be considered an application in itself, running on a lower Virtual abstraction layer.

What do you think?