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WEB OS

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DECEMBER 2005

SAY GOODBYE
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WEBOS:

APPLICATIONS
Some call it the second coming of the dot-coms. The blogosphere is buzzing, and new buzzwords are minted daily in the press: “Web 2.0,” “Weblications,” and “WebOS”— the Web-based Operating System. Email, the Internet’s first killer app, has now largely migrated from the desktop tothe Web. Instant messaging, word processing, and even spreadsheets aren’t far behind. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan once sang, but do we know what it is?
Illustration by Steven Adler

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WEB OS

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DECEMBER 2005

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The Web is making an evolutionary leap from a document-delivery system to an application framework. The new Web has the potential to pull the rugout from under the desktop, along with the applications and vendors who have built their fortunes there. Of course, not everyone is convinced that evolution equals revolution. Critics say the WebOS is more hot air than hot news. But WebOS evangelists believe they know exactly what’s happening here—and that it has already begun.

computer and the whole global network?

Déjà Vu All Over Again
Tosome veterans of the technology industry, the excitement bubbling over WebOS sounds more than a little familiar. Flashback to the ’70s, when central processing units were housed in their own rooms, and computer scientists and grad students huddled around “dumb terminals” to write code in Fortran. Dumb terminals were simply monitors and keyboards, relying on processing power elsewhere (the nextroom, usually), since it was not feasible to equip each workstation with its own processing unit. Even by the early ’80s, as the personal computer revolution was just beginning to catch fire, dumb terminals ruled, although by then young computer scientists had the luxury of their Sony Walkman to keep them company. Historians—that is, those of us older than 20—will also remember the short-lived “thinclient” push during the dot-com boom of the mid-’90s. Espoused most publicly by Oracle chief Larry Ellison, thin clients represented a vision of the WebOS to come. Selling cheap hardware boxes that relied on Internet connectivity for most of their productivity was hailed as the future of personal computing. But the vision was much too early. Thin client advocates made the mistake of exchangingpower for connectivity. Thin client machines themselves were underpowered and kind of fey, particularly in a market where full-muscled PC hardware was rapidly declining in price. More importantly, thin clients weren’t mobile, just when mobile computing was taking off. And the Internet itself did not reach a critical mass of ubiquity nearly as quickly as thin client investors had assumed. In otherwords, almost everything that could go wrong with the thin client initiative did go wrong. Believers in the WebOS see the failed thin client movement not as philosophically misguided, necessarily, but illtimed and poorly executed.

The WebOS Vision
The entirety of WebOS isn’t a real thing (yet), nor is it a specific thing (yet). WebOS is a concept which lays down a roadmap— a gauntlet, even—forhow a convergence of software and the Web may up-end the way we compute and disrupt entrenched market forces. The history of personal computing has so far been dominated by one-box solutions—a physical container holding all the software and hardware you need to run your applications. A desktop operating system like Microsoft Windows or Apple’s OS X provides a series of interfaces between thehardware inside the box and the software you run—your word processors, graphic design tools, Web browser, etc. The desktop operating system expects most of its resources to be located inside that box—the graphics card to output video, the hard disks to store data, and so on. The Internet, and particularly the Web, exploded the concept of computers as isolated islands. We are now connected and...