Breaking news – Microsoft Accepts that Operating Systems are Dead!

By Ben Kepes on October 9, 2008

OK, OK that title was a little (very) tongue in cheek. However it was really
interesting to read that the next version of Windows, Windows 7,
will ship without any e-mail, photo editing, and movie making applications built
in. Operating system general manager Brian Hall was quoted as saying that;

It makes it much cleaner and we can do things with specific partners to
enable really great experiences that might be hard in Windows

That, as they say, was straight from the horses mouth.

So we're seeing Microsoft realise that an
operating system is a very finite and core set of functionalities related to
startup, device driving and the like – all the extraneous bits and pieces we can
do elsewhere – I'd hazard a guess that even within Hall's own team – his
staffers are e-mailing within a third party web-app, photo editing online and
making movies…. well at least in the privacy of their own homes

Of course the extension of all this gets me back to a post I wrote over a year ago. As I said in that post;

…what is an operating system? It runs a few drivers that control some
peripheral stuff. It launches the web browser that allows me to do whatever it
is I want to do. But what else?

Seems like a hell of a lot of disk space, code and processing speed for very
little actual use. And if this is the case then there is a serious lack of
design over this aspect of the way things work.

So I spend around 90% of my computing time in the clouds – the few apps that
are still installed on my machine are gradually being weeded out. That being the
case I'd envisage more and more stuff being carved out of operating systems as
it becomes unnecessarily a duplication of something we do on the web.

And the final stage in the process? An OS-less world where the browser does
everything for us.

Nice!