The future of the OS

Virtualization

There's plenty of good reads on Scott Lowe's blog and I just finished one on his and other's thinking of the future of operating systems:

I do agree with these conclusions on at least one point:  The general purpose operating system as we know it will cease to exist in the next 5 to 10 years, perhaps sooner.  I do believe that the release of massive development projects such as Windows Vista won’t be the norm moving forward and that, in fact (as others have predicted as well), Windows Vista will be the last of its kind.

Notice I didn’t place Mac OS X in that list as well.  Why?  Because I think that Apple is capitalizing on an architecture and a convergence of technology that allows it to make Mac OS X into what Windows NT was supposed to be.  (Go back and read the stories about the development of Windows NT and look at Dave Cutler’s vision for the operating system—an application environment-agnostic system in which OS/2, Windows, and POSIX-compliant applications could all run without modification.)  Does that sound like anything else we have these days?  With Mac OS X today, I can run native Macintosh applications, command-line UNIX applications (sometimes straight “out of the box”, sometimes needing a quick recompile), and X11-based applications.  Add in something like WINE (the open source Win32 API implementation) and we gain the ability to run many (but not all) Windows applications.  Add in a virtualization solution such as that created by VMware or Parallels and you gain the ability to run any Windows application.

Read the rest here.