Novell's Nat Friedman told InternetNews.com: "The basic concept here is that the standalone operating system is dead." Friedman is Novell's Chief Technology Officer. He added: "The days in which people buy operating systems on their own and then build a stack from there [...] will look like home-built automobiles in the future - people aren't going to do this anymore." This is not the first time some big company predicts the end of the traditional operating system.
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Member since:2006-10-15
Yeah, I think you're right that the desktop OS isn't going to die soon. On the other hand, he seems to be focusing very heavily on enterprise uses, which are often filled with hundreds of drones using a single application (which are increasingly web based).
Appliances are popular in business, and that is what Novell cares about. Just like RedHat, who earlier said they aren't very interested in a consumer OS.
Keep in mind that web apps are slowly becoming less browser-based. I think a lot of Office apps are going to be handled perfectly by web apps in the future.
As you said, desktops will be left for the apps that actually require it. Fast CPUs, lots of memory and fast disks are for photo/video editing, gaming, etc. Even then, you get better performance on systems (appliances?) that are solely meant for a single task, like your xbox or ps3.
Member since:2007-01-22
how can the desktop die? ok, people would rather play games in front of their tv because the screen is bigger. But you won't want to read text on them and that's the case with smartphones and pdas as well because the screen is too small.
The best mobile device and gaming console will be the one that recognizes the need to work with the pc instead of trying to knock it off.
Member since:2006-06-09
Funny, as many will say that an xbox or a ps3 is far more similar - both hardware and system software - to a gaming desktop than a PDA appliance.
After all, an xbox run a stripped down Windows 2000 kernel tuned for best game and multimedia experience, while desktop PC still don't run up-scaled appliances operating systems.
Member since:
2005-07-23
I really doubt we'll get rid of regular desktops and oses for as long as the web are the only alternative. Seriously web apps sucks, even gmail will be and are worse than a good e-mail client, and well, then what more is there to get? I guess web apps could work ok for a calendar to, but preferably not even for a word processor, even less for something like adobe lightroom or imovie or reason or ...
The web wasn't made for this. People (still) try to design their webpages as if it was a medium designed to be pixel perfect and for exact and accurate design which showed up the same everywhere, guess what? It's not. The information is what matters and if anything imho it's the browsers work to present it in a decent way. If people didn't expect browsers to work like images in photoshop we would have way less problems.
Edited 2008-04-17 22:54 UTC