The Incredible Shrinking Operating System
Google’s new Chrome operating system is a challenge to Microsoft in several ways. It will offer a free rival to Windows, which can add $25 to $100 to the price of a computer. But it also represents a conceptual slap at the elaborate array of features that make up the soon-to-be-unveiled Windows 7.
Chrome OS will be positively minimalist by contrast. It will be built on a simple version of Linux that is meant to run only one application: the Chrome browser. Google’s idea is that anything for which you may have wanted a separate software program can be done within the browser instead. Never mind all the other functions and add-on programs you find in Windows.
This vision of the declining importance of the operating system reminds me of a conversation I had recently with Paul Maritz, the chief executive of VMware and a former top Microsoft executive who once ran its operating system unit.
“The traditional operating system is becoming less and less important,” Mr. Maritz said. “It’s not going to go away, but it is going to shrink.”
VMware is in a fierce battle with Microsoft for the hearts and minds of executives who run big corporate data centers. So take Mr. Maritz’s predictions in that light. But he nonetheless paints the same scenario for Microsoft’s big customers that Google’s vision relies on for individual PCs.
An operating system, as Mr. Maritz describes it, does two things. It is the central nervous system of a computer, controlling the disk drives, memory, displays and such. And it provides a toolkit for people writing programs, allowing them to save steps and also make all the programs operate in consistent ways. Windows, for example, defines how menus appear, how programs look for files, how they can display video and myriad other functions.
Both roles are being usurped by new technology, Mr. Maritz argued.
VMware makes software that inserts itself between the operating system and the actual hardware it runs on. It performs a function called virtualization — allowing programs and operating systems to be shuffled among different computers so they can be used more efficiently. One minute a given server could run Windows and the next, VMware could swap in a different application running Linux. Microsoft has its own virtualization system, although it mainly supports Windows.
Meanwhile, Mr. Maritz said there were new ways that developers wrote applications that relied less on the services in the operating system. For example, they can use software known as development frameworks. Microsoft’s own .Net framework is one. But there are others, including versions of Java, Ruby on Rails and Django.
“There are very few developers who write applications directly to Windows or Linux,” Mr. Maritz said. “They write applications to one of these frameworks.”
The frameworks, in turn, are made to work on a variety of different operating systems. “If you are in Ruby on Rails, you have to work really hard to tell what the operating system is, it is so far removed,” Mr. Maritz said.
This is much the same as on personal computers, where you can’t really tell if you are on a Windows machine or a Mac if all you are doing is using a Web browser.
VMware is deliberately trying to squeeze the role of the operating system by working directly with the developers of these application environments to create features that take advantage of its software. And it is supporting a movement called “Just enough operating system” which encourages developers to use the smallest subset needed of the pieces of an operating system.
Clearly this isn’t the only model around for running servers. Microsoft has its own vision of how data centers will evolve, with services like Azure, its operating system for cloud computing.
But the nature of its competition is changing. It is not enough for Microsoft to simply prove that Windows is better than OS X, Linux and other operating systems. The company increasingly has to convince customers that they need an operating system at all.
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