A New Take On Operating Systems: Responding to Chrome OS

Everyone is all spun up to the point of having their heads explode about Chrome OS.

This is being cast in a very obvious way: an attack on Microsoft whose future remains tightly linked to Windows.

But what is happening here is the first foray into a new generation of user experience, and unltimately, a new paradigm for the Web, more than for the desktop.

Way back in October 2007, Jasons Calacanis tried to brand something Web 3.0, and I responded with this:

[via /Message: Jason Calacanis on Web 3.0]

Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That’s what Web 3.0 will be, but I bet we will call it something else.

Paradoxically, Google (or whoever) building a new operating system for edge devices (all our PCs, laptops, netbooks, handhelds, cell phones) that is predicated on the Web existing as the primary model of interaction and information access and storage will spell the end of the browser as we know it.

Think how odd it is to have a bazillion apps that we run on our desktops, but a single porthole to the web? A porthole that has to do a mazillion things?

If we rethink the operating environment for edge devices under the assumption that they will (nearly) always be connected to the Web, then a single swiss army knife tool to access everything online is a dumb approach. Instead, build browserish capabilities into the OS so that developers are free to construct all sorts of different and specialized apps, relying on common services for caching, messaging, and so on.

Yes, Microsft will be the ox first gored by this, but so will Apple — whose OS is still stuck in the 90’s, although much much better than Windows, lord knows — as well as Linux and all the old school phone OS’s.

It will all rapidly shift into a very different world. We will all be reformatting our hard drives in the near future, and never looking back.