A fascinating article and on the money IMO. I definitely see this outsourcing of capacity to anonymised servers in the cloud, with tools like map/reduce and memcached becoming cloud-equivalents of single-OS concepts.
Interesting how social is just one aspect, though; and the logical integration of social into this model is as a platform or API. Just as in the 'perfect' OS you would have a centralised address book, in the Internet OS you have a platform-neutral, universally-accessible social graph. Is social just a part of the picture? The way I see it, social's the centre of the picture, lately.
There's also a fight between local-resource apps and this thin-client approach, mainly for functionality that can't be outsourced to the cloud - gaming, Excel, even some kinds of hacking. Google Docs, games-in-the-browser technologies are working to fight this, but it's not going to be an overnight battle.
Interesting how social is just one aspect, though; and the logical integration of social into this model is as a platform or API. Just as in the 'perfect' OS you would have a centralised address book, in the Internet OS you have a platform-neutral, universally-accessible social graph. Is social just a part of the picture? The way I see it, social's the centre of the picture, lately.
There's also a fight between local-resource apps and this thin-client approach, mainly for functionality that can't be outsourced to the cloud - gaming, Excel, even some kinds of hacking. Google Docs, games-in-the-browser technologies are working to fight this, but it's not going to be an overnight battle.