Ask the Reader: Your Prediction. Will the OS As We Know It Go Away? {Poll}

• mingsish
  The OS will journey long and hard into a land of ice and jagged lava rock. There it will hunt the wild beast and become a man. It will return to us one day mature, less needy, and less demanding....or not it could go either way.
• Greg D
  The OS provides an interface between the hardware and the applications. This is the reason the OS was created in the first place. Typically, applications that run in a given OS generally utilize standardized functionality to access files (for open, close and such) and speak to hardware using a basic language that the OS translates into a hardware-specific language via the hardware's driver. Otherwise the application would have to be designed to allow for any and all hardware that it might be run on. You can look at the old DOS-run games like Doom2 and the original GTA to see this problem in action. If you don't have a supported graphics card, you can't run the game right. The introduction of Win95 and DirectX allowed game developers to program for DirectX and let the OS handle the hardware. At that point, all that was left was for graphics card manufacturers to support DirectX. Now we enjoy the bliss of plugging in the fastest card we can afford and let the virtual bloodshed ensue without wondering if the game supports it.
  
  An additional benefit of having an OS is a unified appearance. However, since applications such as WinAmp started skinning their appearance rather than using the standard windows, many applications have followed suit (including MS's own Media Player). Having these standard dialogs for file browsing and other functions does make for easier programming as well. Otherwise, the developer would have to incorporate all of those details in their application, resulting in even larger application distributions.
  
  The OS also provide a user interface, without which the computer would just be a paperweight. How would you tell the computer what program to run? Maybe through a thumb drive containing that application. But then you'd have to have a separate drive for each application. Even then, the computer would have to have some sort of programming to recognize the drive being attached, search files, and run the application (basically what an OS does when you insert the SolidWorks install DVD).
  
  There really is a lot that the OS does for us, most of which we as end-users don't see. I don't think I can see computers without some sort of OS. Application-hardware communication is the second to the problem of a user interface. I don't think that we can eliminate the OS, but maybe it should be minimized. The only problem that remains is that Apple thinks an OS should run one way, and MS thinks it should run another way, while still Google thinks it should run some other way, and on. I don't think they're up to cooperating to create a standardized OS just yet.
• Steve Klabnik
  While your point is valid, and I agree with you, it doesn't address one point that the article brings up; CAD in the cloud. It's not so much that it doesn't need an OS as that it's OS agnostic.
• Nea
  Couldn't agree more. And let's not forget about WPF (Windows Presentation Fundation, XAML) and Silverlight which together form a great mix of being desktop and web-related in one go. It's such a beautiful solution, which allows to gradually go from desktop to web. That's why Microsoft is best prepared for every situation. Apples OSX? No solutions there - doesn't even come close. Google? Nice ideas with great impact on whole industry, but they are traditionally very week in terms of interface design. Microsoft is here to stay for a while with the best proposition mix.
• Mike Puckett
  Thats the great part about technology, you never know what will happen next. The important think I think to remember is to stay open minded to change and try out new stuff instead of trying to stick with the old way of doing things. We certainly are living in exciting times!
• Steve Klabnik
  An interesting approach to this is one based off of Linux LiveCDs. Essentially, LiveCDs load the entire OS into memory off of a CD, without the need to install it on your hard drive. You could modify this idea, and take out most of the usual interface things, and make it just run your application on boot.
  
  There was some talk of doing this for games, but I don't think anyone actually did it.
• gauravM
  An interesting approach to this is one based off of Linux LiveCDs. Essentially, LiveCDs load the entire OS into memory off of a CD, without the need to install it on your hard drive. You could modify this idea, and take out most of the usual interface things, and make it just run your application on boot. Thanks for sharing.
• jimanders
  For the foreseeable future CAD apps will run on an OS. The demanding memory and graphics requirements will require closely coupled OS and local processing power. Webapps for light duty stuff like small spreadsheets or shared word proc docs is fine, but with CAD files (i.e. SolidWorks) measured in megabytes having high speed local hardware and file access will be needed.
  
  Oh, and SolidWorks really should do a native Mac OS X version of SolidWorks.
  
  With the upcoming release of Snow Leopard in a few weeks, 64 bit computing will be standard on the Mac. Their GPU technology built into the OS that handles general computer is also a killer app. Competition is good.
• ion
  Thinstalled tools are your friend.

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