Here's an interesting blog post from Tim O'Reilly. I am sure you have a point of view--one way or the other--about whether there is an OS for the Internet. I like you to review the post and either comment directly on his blog or on here. I think it allows us to develop a broader view of the role of Internet as part of business models in the coming decade.
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My understanding is that a traditional OS (e.g. Windows on my laptop) is essentially a gatekeeper--sort of like a clerk in a store where everything is behind the counter and you need to ask for it. It has two primary functions.
ReplyDelete1. Controlling access: the OS controls how and when applications access machine resources (e.g. CPU time, memory, disk space, input/output devices) to ensure everything works in an orderly way and malicious programs can’t cause damage or steal data.
2. Simplifying interaction: the OS provides an interface so that if you know how to communicate with it, you can get what you want without knowing the details about memory locations or drive sectors whatever. Operating systems like Windows also have a lot of software processes and routines bundled with them. Applications can call upon these so that developers don’t have to include the code in every program they write.
But it seems that today’s applications increasingly want to use not only the software and hardware in their own machines, but also services on other machines. From the perspective of the operating system on your laptop or mobile device, these services are somewhere “in the cloud.” Your machine’s OS does not exclusively control access to them. It merely forwards a request to another machine’s OS. In regard to the first function of the OS, controlling access to machine resources, perhaps whatever OS exists on the server (such as Linux on Google’s search servers) essentially still performs this function. If so, it would be better to speak of the Internet not as having a single OS, but as consisting of a collection of operating systems, like little security guards who send messages back and forth across Cisco’s wires.
However, with regard to the second function of the OS, simplifying interaction, the picture is less clear. I think this is what Tim O’Reilly is referring to when he talks about the Internet OS. All these distributed services are valuable if you can pull a bunch of them together and integrate them in creative ways. But it is easier to communicate with an intermediary who can access services for you, rather than have to worry about the details of how each one works and how you talk to it. Various companies are vying to build this platform, with Google in the lead.
I’ve always thought of the cloud as an abstraction, a lazy way of saying “don’t bore me with the details so long as it works.” But perhaps it’s worth looking at the cloud more closely.