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Wouldn't it be great if we could buy an application and not have to worry about whether it was designed to run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, MAC OS X or some flavor of linux?

How about when you buy a personal computer you don't have to make a decison on whether it should come with Windows XP, Windows Vista, MAC OS X (don't you wish that was a choice today) or some flavor of linux - or nothing and you figure it out later?

What if every computer you bought came with a smal, highly efficient operating system that basically only acted similar to a virtual machine hypervisor, managing the allocation of resources to virtual machines (or applications). And by the way it was built into the "platform" supplied by the chip vendor and OEM's only aggregated components and added value where it counts - tools to better manage the virtual enviornments, as a peer process not as a "host" operating system.

This is the world that I would like to see evolve over the next couple of years (okay maybe 5).

Applications are compiled with the operating system extensions (purchased from today or tomorrow's operating system vendors) and sold as one package that runs on top of the thin/efficient operating system mentioned above. This way we as the consumers can worry about selecting applications and functionality and get out of the business of worrying about which operating system to buy - or worrying about which operating sytem the application will run on. We just buy the application!!! What a concept!!!

A nice extension to this would be to allow the ability to still have a more traditional "container" of applications for secure, managed interaction between applications and for providing a policy managed environment. But the applications should still be the same apps I buy to run independently - So how about an install option - standalone or in a "container" or ???

Now that would be cool.

Tags: client_architecture, software_development, virtualization, alternate_compute_models
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May 25, 2008 12:29 PM Reply Guest --==[FReeZ]==--,

Man, I cannot agree with your idea. Operating system is here to provide the API and the Hardware Abstraction Layer. It is not possible to force the commercial subjects to use the concrete implementatoin, but if you need to see how it looks, we have consoles such as Playstation or XBox made by one concrete vendor, who gives the same hardware inside, see? But now, back to the computers, everybody has different hardware, different software and different purpose of it. I believe it will be never unified, because communism doesn't work.,

May 29, 2008 1:29 PM Reply Click to view tamant's profile tamant

I think I may have not been clear enough then - the point is to actually go further away from the hard link between operating system and hardware - to provide a simplistic api instead of the bloated overloaded operating system of today, that is slow and limits the processing power of a virtual machine. The point is to have a virtual machine manager that is an industry standard that all systems run and the spin I put on it is to have the current os vendors create include files for application developers that can be used to create their applications. The value to the os vendors is when they create high value add extensions that the apps developers can leverage - but they still run on any hardware that a consumer buys - feels like a win-win to me. OS vendors can differentiate without locking out a consumer base - likewise for the apps developers and for me as a consumer I get more choices in applications and don't have to worry about what stupid operating system I'm running.