The Operating System originated as a common set of platform management abstractions, to free software developers from the complexity of managing hardware. To many of us that concept has become somewhat distant and when we think OS we usually think in terms of UI or GUI (Graphical User Interface). Most of the current generation of operating systems have become exceedingly bloated primarily because, their creators have been pushing the notion of the OS as a competitive differentiator for many years.

In the early days computers had a single CPU and the obvious thing to do was to build an Operating System that could run many different applications, preferably at once. This created the need for more functionality to manage resources and also manage the applications themselves. Added to this, many OS vendors started to bundle even more widgets, gadgets and applications to their offerings and hey presto - it takes me several minutes to wait for my computer to start-up anytime I want to do anything, this despite the fact that all I want to do is get at Firefox.

My gut-feeling is that Cloud Computing is about to kill the operating system as we know it. The fatal blow has in-fact already been dealt but the demise will not likely be recognised for some time yet.

Desktop Operating Systems

With increasing adoption of Cloud Computing and SaaS it seems to me that, increasingly the tasks I want to complete on a computer are presented to me in a browser. My browser runs on top of my operating system which has a bunch of features and complexity that I would rather forget about. In order to run my operating system with all its bells and whistles the hardware I have is, no doubt vastly over-specked - yet it still takes a number of minutes for me to get going every-time I start-up (Windows Vista in this case is shamefully bloated and slow).

Google recognised this frustration and in July of this year came out and announced its Google Chrome OS. My understanding of Chrome OS is that, in essence it will be a stripped out and hardened Linux Kernel with the ability to run a browser and little or no extra functionality. Google claim they will have users up and running in seconds and promise an end to security vulnerabilities, viruses and malware. This sounds like a good proposition to me - and it will be free, better again.

Meanwhile Microsoft came out and told the world about its research on Gazelle. Gazelle is a research program Microsoft are running under the title “The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser”. Its interesting that Microsoft’s approach is still underpinned by Windows 7, which I admit I haven’t seen or tested yet, but I have my concerns about its bloat-factor having observed many new Microsoft OSes over many years.

I am not aware of significant research efforts by other companies into offerings that will compete head-on with Goggle’s Chrome OS or Gazelle, however many Linux OSes are very nicely placed to jump into this changing eco-system and capture significant market share. In my view there are three primary reasons that have, thus far stopped Linux from taking a much more significant desktop market share;

Breaking this down a little bit, most Linux OSes are extremely robust and efficient platforms, the GUI in most instances runs as an added application but in my view is pug ugly. So simply by removing the GUI app and running your choice of browser directly on the OS possibly provides a realistic alternative. As mentioned previously, most of what today’s and tomorrows users require is presented to them in a browser, so why bother with the rest of the OS? I guess this is what Google are doing with Chrome OS - but with independent Linux offerings users are not necessarily tied to a specific browser. The problem of installing mainstream applications is quickly disappearing with browser delivered SaaS models, and finally the branding issue? Perhaps there is room here for Firefox, who have a very significant browser market share compared to the resources available to them to jump in and disrupt the market?

So in conclusion, perhaps the Desktop Operating System isnt whats under threat here, maybe we will see the OS going all the way back to its roots again becoming a set of platform management abstractions. Maybe then its the GUI that is at stake? This could explain why Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO) recently went on the offensive talking trash about the Google Chrome OS and Apples Safari browser, calling them “rounding errors”. In the same breath he also noted that Mozilla’s Firefox was (in the browser market) the most successful so-far. Evidently what is really upsetting Balmer is Google’s recent announcement of its “Internet Explorer Chrome Frame Plug-in”, this according to Balmer is Google replacing Microsoft’s browser rendering engine without telling you, and he calls it an “unanticipated competitive attack factor”.

Microsoft after-all has reason to be concerned, there is a lot at stake here, in their fiscal year 2009 they had revenues of almost $15 Billion from selling their Operating Systems. 80% of which was received from OEM’s (computer manufacturers who bundle windows on their products). If there were to be any significant shift in this pattern it would have an immediate impact on what appears to be Microsoft’s most profitable business line. Additionally the broad market penetration of Windows Desktops eases the way for many of Microsoft’s other products.

Server Operating Systems

Over on the server OS front there is likely to be an even more interesting evolution over time. While many IT Departments and Hosting Companies have for the past couple of years put significant investment of time and resources into virtualising their server infrastructure, little has changed because most of this virtualisation still uses the principle of running a single Server OS on a single virtual machine (basically swapping bare-metal for VM’s).

On the Cloud Computing front Amazon offers an excellent alternative to in-house virtualisation with its EC2 offering and recent analysis by Guy Rosen estimates the number of Amazon EC2 instances launched daily in their us-east-1 region at 50,000 (bear in mind that this is only one of a handful of regions for Amazon EC2).

However many commentators are predicting that Virtual Machines and even Amazons EC2 are only a stop-gap measure on our way to something completely different. The argument is that the Operating System as the owner of a single servers hardware (either bare-metal or virtualised) will lose dominance over time as the the abstractions of computing, storage and networking that enable resource pooling, multi-tenancy, high availability, dynamic workload balancing and the other benefits that arise from a virtualised infrastructure become a reality.

This concept is already taking root with a number of vendors. Noteably Microsoft’s Azure platform decouples the infrastructure completely from the application layer providing flexible virtualised compute, storage and networking capabilities for developers. Currently Azure only supports .NET but as I understand it, support for Ruby-on-Rails, Python and PHP will be added in the near future. Over at Amazon there are 2 services in this category that are also gaining traction, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3, SimpleDB is a virtualised database service and S3 is a storage service.

With all these compute, networking database and storage resources being presented to us as virtual layers and the availability of other major cloud computing offerings such as Google Apps, SalesForce.com, etc., etc., it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to see where the traditional server operating system fits into the IT puzzle of the future.

As always, your comments are welcome.

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Azure, Cloud Computing, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft, PaaS, S3, SaaS, SalesForce.com, SimpleDB, VM Ware