NitnayLion
Discoverer
Source: Wincustomize.com
By Brad Wardell
My friend Eugenia over at OSNews.com was lamenting how boring operating systems have become. And I agree. How far we've fallen from the exciting times of 1991 when pre-emptive multitasking, protected applications, flat memory, and object oriented interfaces were about to be delivered to the masses.
Since then, improvements to operating systems have been incremental. Or in some cases, we've actually regressed (largely thanks to jerks taking advantage of open systems to create viruses and spyware). IBM's OS/2 was well on its way to providing an OS in which users from around the world could seamlessly integrate new functionality into the operating system via SOM and OpenDoc. Of course, had that occurred, it would have been the mother of all opportunities for spyware vendors and the creeps who make viruses. The 90s could be looked back upon as a time of naiveté and idealism. It was in that environment that ActiveX and VB Script and Internet Explorer Outlook Express were designed that we now rue because of the exploitative nature of malicious people.
And so in the past few years the two major OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple have largely taken on the role of tossing in features into the OS that third parties had already provided or that the other had managed to come up with on its own. And then after that the Linux vendors then try to mimic that (there, I've offended all 3 camps!).
With MacOS X, Apple finally managed to put together a stable operating system with preemptive multitasking and memory protection. The first release was slow and buggy but subsequent versions got better and better. MacOS X Tiger looks to be a refinement on what has come before along with Apple's usual innovative twists on existing concepts (ex: Dashboard). Apple's "innovation" with MacOS X has been very very gradual -- a far cry from the heady days of "Pink", "Taligent", and "OpenDoc". This is particularly true when one considers its ancestor, NeXTStep was released in the late 80s.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has contented itself with lifting shareware programs and throwing it into the OS. WinZip sure looks popular, let's put ZIP into the OS. Hey, AOL is annoying us, let's tweak them by making our media player skinnable and tossing that in. Hey, let's put in a basic movie editing program too. Ooh, WindowBlinds sure looks nice, let's make our OS have its own skin too. Meanwhile, in areas that there's little third party innovation (or at least competition) things haven't progressed very much. Outlook Express hasn't changed much since 1998. Internet Explorer is still roughly the same today as it was in 1998. Now before any Windows zealots get on me, I'm not saying that users haven't benefited some from Microsoft tossing in home grown (or contracted out) copies of third party programs. I like being able to work with ZIP files "natively". But bundling more content with the OS is not the same as innovation. To be fair, Microsoft's Longhorn project is very ambitious and Avalon promises to, at the very least, pave the way to really control how large things appear on our monitors without giving up resolution.
Yea yea, talk is cheap. So what should the OS vendors be doing? I can think of five things that operating system developers should look at having part of the OS.
#1 Seamless Distributed Computing
#2 Seamless Distributed File System Databases
#3 Global User Management
#4 Universal environments
#5 Component Based operating systems
Now you might be thinking, "Well if you think these ideas are so great, why don't you do them?" The answer is, only the OS vendor can, as a practical matter, do this. If a third party makes these things and it's successful, it's only a matter of time (probably one version) before the OS vendor puts in one of these on their own, wiping out the "low hanging fruit" part of the market. As soon as some third party, for instance, put out a really good distributed computing product that "did it right" and started to make good business that targets consumers (DWL: Armtech is not a consumer product and isn't what I'm talking about), you could be assured that the next version of the OS would have some basic implementation of this put in. And the OS vendor's fans would chime in, "That should be part of the OS anyway!" In short, there's no business case for a third party to invest the money to develop these things because the pay-off isn't there.
But if these features were part of the OS, you could imagine how it might lead to dramatic changes in the way we use and think about computers. And to add to that, imagine the kinds of additional innovations that would present themselves if these things were already taken as a given?
Full Story HERE
By Brad Wardell
My friend Eugenia over at OSNews.com was lamenting how boring operating systems have become. And I agree. How far we've fallen from the exciting times of 1991 when pre-emptive multitasking, protected applications, flat memory, and object oriented interfaces were about to be delivered to the masses.
Since then, improvements to operating systems have been incremental. Or in some cases, we've actually regressed (largely thanks to jerks taking advantage of open systems to create viruses and spyware). IBM's OS/2 was well on its way to providing an OS in which users from around the world could seamlessly integrate new functionality into the operating system via SOM and OpenDoc. Of course, had that occurred, it would have been the mother of all opportunities for spyware vendors and the creeps who make viruses. The 90s could be looked back upon as a time of naiveté and idealism. It was in that environment that ActiveX and VB Script and Internet Explorer Outlook Express were designed that we now rue because of the exploitative nature of malicious people.
And so in the past few years the two major OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple have largely taken on the role of tossing in features into the OS that third parties had already provided or that the other had managed to come up with on its own. And then after that the Linux vendors then try to mimic that (there, I've offended all 3 camps!).
With MacOS X, Apple finally managed to put together a stable operating system with preemptive multitasking and memory protection. The first release was slow and buggy but subsequent versions got better and better. MacOS X Tiger looks to be a refinement on what has come before along with Apple's usual innovative twists on existing concepts (ex: Dashboard). Apple's "innovation" with MacOS X has been very very gradual -- a far cry from the heady days of "Pink", "Taligent", and "OpenDoc". This is particularly true when one considers its ancestor, NeXTStep was released in the late 80s.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has contented itself with lifting shareware programs and throwing it into the OS. WinZip sure looks popular, let's put ZIP into the OS. Hey, AOL is annoying us, let's tweak them by making our media player skinnable and tossing that in. Hey, let's put in a basic movie editing program too. Ooh, WindowBlinds sure looks nice, let's make our OS have its own skin too. Meanwhile, in areas that there's little third party innovation (or at least competition) things haven't progressed very much. Outlook Express hasn't changed much since 1998. Internet Explorer is still roughly the same today as it was in 1998. Now before any Windows zealots get on me, I'm not saying that users haven't benefited some from Microsoft tossing in home grown (or contracted out) copies of third party programs. I like being able to work with ZIP files "natively". But bundling more content with the OS is not the same as innovation. To be fair, Microsoft's Longhorn project is very ambitious and Avalon promises to, at the very least, pave the way to really control how large things appear on our monitors without giving up resolution.
Yea yea, talk is cheap. So what should the OS vendors be doing? I can think of five things that operating system developers should look at having part of the OS.
#1 Seamless Distributed Computing
#2 Seamless Distributed File System Databases
#3 Global User Management
#4 Universal environments
#5 Component Based operating systems
Now you might be thinking, "Well if you think these ideas are so great, why don't you do them?" The answer is, only the OS vendor can, as a practical matter, do this. If a third party makes these things and it's successful, it's only a matter of time (probably one version) before the OS vendor puts in one of these on their own, wiping out the "low hanging fruit" part of the market. As soon as some third party, for instance, put out a really good distributed computing product that "did it right" and started to make good business that targets consumers (DWL: Armtech is not a consumer product and isn't what I'm talking about), you could be assured that the next version of the OS would have some basic implementation of this put in. And the OS vendor's fans would chime in, "That should be part of the OS anyway!" In short, there's no business case for a third party to invest the money to develop these things because the pay-off isn't there.
But if these features were part of the OS, you could imagine how it might lead to dramatic changes in the way we use and think about computers. And to add to that, imagine the kinds of additional innovations that would present themselves if these things were already taken as a given?
Full Story HERE
