The operating system as we know it is dead. Long live the operation system.
That’s what I thought this morning as I contemplated the potentially imminent release of Google OS. Now, I don’t know if Techcrunch has their dates right–or even whether their screenshots are accurate (many people think it is just the Chrome browser running on top of Ubuntu) but it got me to thinking about how much operating systems are going to change over the comings years, and what that means for the changing business landscape. I’ll start with some of my conclusions, and work back from there:
- The biggest opportunity is developing for application platforms that offer the widest/cheapest distribution possible
- It’s inevitable that the heavy-duty, bloated operating systems of today (and yes, I’m looking at you Windows 7, OS 10, and even Ubuntu) will be able to place most of their features in the browser or in the cloud
Here are the computers that I use on a regular basis:
- A desktop PC running Windows XP (I’m typing from that now). It’s main use is to be a Web browser, and sometimes run high-end PC games or open up the occasional Microsoft Office file.
- A laptop PR running Windows Vista, mostly used as a Web browser and/or Microsoft Office file.
- A Netbook, running Windows XP, used for Web browsing.
- A file server running Ubuntu and a few miscellaneous server-side applications at home.
- An in-the-cloud server running Ubuntu over at Slicehost, used for running Radoff.com and some other side projects.
- An iPhone, mostly used as a phone, but also as a media player and Web browser.
- An Xbox 360, mostly used as a movie player (!) and sometimes as a game machine.
- A Nintendo DS, used as a portable game system (although recently I’ve also run My Chinese Coach
, since I’m learning Mandarin Chinese).
I probably fall well-into the “geek” side of the spectrum in terms of the diversity and number of machines I interact with regularly. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’m too different from most consumers in the US. That is, you can break my usage down into several categories:
- Playing games on a device that requires specialized game-playing video hardware and drivers
- Accessing the Web from a Web browser (which can run on virtually any device)
- Accessing or maintaining in-the-cloud services
- Use of business productivity apps
- Making phone calls
How many people reading this can remember when a decent laptop PC in the US cost $5000+? How about when a “serious” workstation needed for engineering or science cost over $10,000? You wouldn’t spend that much today, would you?
Now, let’s compare those US-type usages to the rest of the world. Let’s think about emerging economies like China. Add to it the huge untapped potential in the rest of Southeast Asia, etc. How many people there are going to buy $2000+ PCs so that they can play a game or access productivity applications? We already know the answer to this–in a lot of developing countries, the main contact with a PC (for games, Web access) are in Internet Cafes. In China, around 200MM+ people are online, but the majority of people access the Internet from these cafes. And there’s a some data that suggest that the main thing they’re doing in Cafes is playing games. What’s the other thing that’s extremely popular in China? Over half the population of China have a mobile phone. They have an appetite for the applications and games, but aren’t willing to buy and maintain a complex home PC setup.
I think we’re in the midst of an interesting economic cycle. For the past two decades, US and European consumers funded the creation of advanced technology (Internet, game machines, computers, etc.) that are quite expensive on a per-capita basis. On one hand, we have the emergence of cheaper PCs like Netbooks, mobile phones like the iPhone that are more powerful than the a Nintendo DS or Sony Playstation Portable, cloud-based computing that offers more economic models for deploying big applications, online application platforms like Facebook and Saleforce AppExchange for solving monetization and distribution challenges. Developing economies in Asia take advantage of the huge Western technology investment, leapfrogging our dependence on landline phones and expensive PCs, and building a better infrastructure suited to scaling up a massive consumer audience around cheap, simple devices. I think we’ll learn a lot from Asia in terms of better economic models, ways to manufacture products for huge markets, and new approaches to technology that aren’t as mired in legacies.
We’re already seeing new platforms like OnLive that are encroaching one of the strongholds of proprietary hardware/OS platforms: games. For those that aren’t familiar with them, OnLive is creating a platform for storing and rendering state-of-the-art 3D games in the cloud. Latency will be a huge challenge, and I think OnLive (and their competitors) have a long way to go, but it gives you a sense of just how much might end up in the cloud in the future. Will we really need anything other than a mobile device that operates as a universal user interface, accesses content and data from the cloud (or caches our favorite content locally), and plugs into whatever display hardware (larger screens for playing games, etc.) we need? We’re seeing virtually everything end up in the cloud. I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to collapse that long list of devices I gave in my introduction into one simple, portable devices I could just plug-in to anything.
Look to Asia to see how our devices will be accessed in the future. Things will come full-circle; just as US/Europe has made the investments that got Asia to this point, now the West is going to benefit from the massive amounts of scale that will be created as every country in Asia manufactures and distributes these devices.
So what’s that mean? And how does it tie back to my original thesis?
Cheap, pervasive hardware is the future: netbooks, increasingly powerful mobile devices, and cheap game systems like the Xbox (at least until I can play an Xbox-type game in the cloud). More and more stuff will be pushed into the cloud, even (gasp!) stuff like games, which still has a long way to go. You simply won’t need a heavy-duty OS.
The Google Chrome OS is positioned where the future of the industry is going.
First, it will create an OS on top of a Linux kernel that can finally be made widely available to the everyday consumer. Most people won’t even realize they are using Linux. Somehow I suspect that will be a good thing, since Linux sounds scary and hard… and Google sounds easy. And for people who do know, the Google brand will give it a new legitimacy.
The future is about cheap, simple and easy. The hard stuff will happen in the cloud. I’m eager to see this happen, and I’m excited about the huge number of business opportunities it will create in everything ranging from new social technology, the next generation of games/entertainment, cloud infrastructure and personal electronics.
on 
