[ILUG] Interesting blog...has the OS become irrelevant ?

[Ivan Griffin]

The browser doesn't hold as much interest for me.  Firefox/WebKit/Chrome 
are all great, but it doesn't seem to matter what tool is used to view 
the content - browser or OS - as long as it is adequate.

What scares me more is how to ensure an open cloud?  How do open source 
and open standards play a role in cloud environments, other than in 
enabling their construction?  Will we see any deeper adoption of open 
source philosophies as opposed to just shallow adoption of open source 
technologies?

How do I get my data out of these remote sites if I become dependent on 
them? Can I rely on open APIs staying open? How to stop them becoming 
information silos?

Also, security is an issue.  An unpatched single machine is one thing - an 
unpatched cloud server is entirely different - much greater bang-per-buck 
for would-be crackers.

Then again, perhaps concerns like these are just for the techophiles 
amongst us.  The average consumer probably doesn't appreciate the 
existence of these issues, and could care less even if they did.

Feels like interesting early days for all this stuff.

I do think it is interesting how the pendulum, every few years, swings 
from centralised to distributed. It wasn't so long ago I remember Sun and 
Oracle pushing the "network computer" concept with Java everywhere...

Perhaps surplus client performance (MIPs, RAM, storage), web technologies 
and pervasive broadband are conspiring to provide us with a tipping point?

Ivan.


On Mon, 20 Apr 2009, John P. Looney wrote:

> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16590
>
> Some decent insight here; it's nice to see someone say "vista failed
> because it was irrelevant" rather than "because it was crap". What it might
> also mean is that we don't need to push linux anymore either; it's just an
> OS, and people have long been content with closed source BIOSes. The OS
> matters less and less, as more magic is in the Browser.
>
> John
>
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