Kill the Operating System!
More thinking about innovation. Wanted to share this excerpt from the article titled "Kill the Operating System! When designing computers, companies could take a lesson from Hollywood" by By Simson Garfinkel. The Net Effect September 2003
You use Windows, I use a Mac, and we both know people who use GNU/Linux. But for all the differences between these three families of computer operating systems, they implement the same fundamental design; all are equally powerful, and equally limiting.
Virtually every operating system in use today is based on a single computer system architecture developed in the 1960s and ’70s. This architecture divides code running on computers into a “kernel,” responsible for controlling the computer’s hardware, and so-called application programs, which are loaded into the computer’s memory to perform individual tasks. Applications, in turn, operate on named files arranged in a tree of folders. True, there are a few niche operating systems that don’t adhere to this tripartite structure, but they are but bit players on the digital stage. Even PalmOS has a kernel, apps, and files (which PalmOS mistakenly calls “databases”). It’s almost inconceivable that this approach won’t be the dominant paradigm for many years to come. And that’s a deep problem for the future of computing.
Hollywood, though, has a better idea.
….It’s not such a far-fetched notion. Alas, the convenient It wouldn’t take much to enable today’s computers to store every version of every document they have ever been used to modify: most people perform fewer than a million keystrokes and mouse clicks each day; a paltry four gigabytes could hold a decade’s worth of typing and revisions if we stored those keystrokes directly, rather than using the inefficient Microsoft Word document format. Abstractions of directories and files make it difficulty for designers to create something different. With a little thought, though, we could do far better. Hollywood has dreamed it; now Silicon Valley needs to make it real.