Technology

Interesting article in Technology Review the other day covering the new Skytone netbook computer running the Android OS. I think this is the tip of the iceberg and not one I can imagine bodes well for Microsoft.

After decades of domination with their ubiquitous Windows operating system the planets are aligning to put Microsoft on the defensive and open the door to other operating systems becoming a viable option for the future. While many of my colleagues might argue that this day is unlikely to be nowhere on the horizon, I beg to differ. When you can see the signs (and products) on the market it means were only really a couple years away. Consider the following:

Rise of the smart phone This should seem obvious. For years most people still remained ensconsced in their perception of the cell phone as something akin to the Startac, a device which made communication truly mobile. Then the Handspring phone hit the scene and we saw our first generation of the Palm OS phone. While the Handspring was somewhat of a failure the Palm Treo certainly did quite well. Soon we had Blackberries and Windows Mobile and the smartphone was the latest geek chic accessory. But the team that had imagined these phones had visions that didn’t depart far from the email/address/calendar on your phone theory. It took a truly inventive company to change the rules of the game, and it happened 2 years ago when Apple released the iPhone. Here was a device that while described as a phone is truly nothing more than a portable computer. With the fully functional browser, camera, MP3 and video player, it was and still is the ultimate convergence device. The other thing it undoubtedly represents is the future of computing. The iPhone might be too small to be a productive day to day business tool but that a simple engineering problem. What it excels in is bringing a new easy to use computing platform to the masses, once the device is scaled it’ll likely push stronger market share for Apple.

But let’s not be so quick to hand the mobile OS crown to Apple. Last year we saw the release of the first Google Android phone and later this year we’ll see a new phone OS from Palm. What’s most important about these OS’ is that they introduce consumers to new computing platforms disguised as a phone. Google’s the first we’ve seen make a concerted jump from the phone to the PC and it’s likely we’ll see more.

Cloud computing has been a new buzzword of late but it’s one which has big implications for the future of the operating system. When I look at computing over the years I think of the progression through the visual of a pendulum swinging. Back when computing was the realm of big companies and universities, access to computing resources were through dummy terminals hooked up to mainframe computers in a back office some where. Of course you still used keyboards and monitors but they were tapping into the same computer everyone else used instead of a local processor. This shared environment changed when the pendulum swung far to the right through the introduction of the personal computer. No longer did you need to share resources on one machine but you had your own machine with it’d own processor, hard drive, memory and operating system. The pendulum has been leaning toward the personal computer for some time now, but the combined forces of Moore’s law driving down the costs of computing and increasing availability of high speed internet access are enabling the rise of cloud computing, a force that is driving the pendulum back in the other direction.

Cloud computing, perhaps more accurately described as distributed computing, is nothing more than many computers operating in parallel for the purposes of enabling a shared platform for running programs in an environment where the inputs and outputs are coming through the internet. In effect, a distributed computing platform is a shared computer, not unlike the mainframe, and the only tool needed to access the platform is a web browser.

The browser is the key to my belief that change is on the way. If you run your word processor in a distributed computing environment all you need to access it is your browser, the same is true of email, or file storage. If you look at some of the big initiatives the power players are working on you’ll see distributed computing all over the place (Amazon EC3, Google App Engine, Microsoft Live Mesh). These companies are banking on the fact that in the future you’ll be running all of your software on the internet and not on your local computer. If that is truly the case we’ll soon see operating systems geared around the browser more than the hard drive.

Admittedly the software available through the browser doesn’t yet rival what’s available on the PC, but things are getting better every day. I’m not quite sure if we’ll see a gradual migration from hard drive computing to browser based computing or if someone will release a dream app that speeds the migration along rapidly. Regardless change is coming, and no matter what form it takes companies are already lining up to grab a share of the OS market (Presto, Hyperspace, Winki) and their key selling points hit Microsoft where it’s weakest – a shorter boot-up time. The question of who’ll win the battle for the operating system has yet to be decided, but with Google’s move into Netbooks it appears the skirmishes that smaller companies have brought to Microsoft are over and the real battle has truly begun.