the onda

All of this hoopla over the new releases of PC operating systems has been bothering me lately, mostly because it's made me think back 10 years to when Windows 95 was released, or even 5 to when Mac OS X first shipped, and think about why today the releases feel like such non-events. Just the other day I was struck by an eager teenager who excitedly tabbloed his Vista unboxing, and at the office they have been relentless about some Vista-related quote I gave an AP writer (mostly because I just really don't care about Vista or its impact on our "lab").

Even this year's MacWorld— usually replete with pronouncements about how OSX is going to change the face of personal computing by introducing features which are long overdue on most client operating systems— was bereft of even a single OSX-related announcement. Craig Syverson over at Venture Cast had an interesting thought on this that got me thinking along a different line: he basically argued that the future of the Mac OS ("Mac OS XI" as he called it) was really iTunes in that more and more of what is relevant to users (media, iPods, mobile phones) was going to start to flow through iTunes, whether on the Mac or on Windows. In this case then, for media hungry consumers, iTunes is the new runtime and everything underneath it really is just a bunch of buggy device drivers.

The geek in me bristles at that, first and foremost because of how closed the whole iTunes ecosystem (including the forthcoming iPhone) is relative to POSIX, Win32, and even OSX. Even the relatively closed cellphone runtimes appear open as a commune by comparison. That said, plenty of valiant startups are finding ways to hack into iTunes to extract metadata and insert themselves into the flow of media— so if the desire is there and the resulting user experience doesn't end up being too encumbered, I'm sure that enterprising and curious geeks will find a way to make Apple's media-based OS XI a more open system.

A more relevant reason as to why OS releases are no irrelevant (hello Marc Andreesen?) is that all of the interesting things you can do with computers now (outside of specialized content creation like programs, video, music, etc.) has little to do with the OS itself unless you count the bits required to run a fast (and standards-compliant) web browser. I first heard Tim O'Reilly articulate this 4 years ago in a talk on the web as platform, but it has become dramatically more true with the development of Web 2.0.

Just this morning, I ran across a YouTube video that really captures the underlying sense of wonder in the possibility of it all when we start thinking of the network as the relevant runtime for innovation. After watching it, I'm sure you will come away thinking that the real innovation these days is as far from a shrink-wrapped box of device drivers as internal combustion is from a barrel of feed.

(the video was made by Michael Wesch, an anthropology professor, and came to me via Frank Gruber).

I highly recommend this video to any of the new web naysayers who think that the biggest things in the web over the last 5 years have been the return of pastels, rounded rects., and XmlHttpRequest replacing hidden iframes. Though it is gimmicky at points, it does a wonderful job of communicating why the folks on the leading edge get so excited about what's been happening in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years.

Update: A sadder but potentially more impactful of example of why the web-as-platform is so much more compelling than 3-D shading on windows and buttons is the search for Jim Gray via the use of a lot of the work/collaboration patterns that have really caught on in the last couple of of years.