Re: Fwd: When will we see a solid capability OS?

On Jan 19, 2008 2:16 PM, Mark Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2008 12:05 AM, Mark Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >If by "commercial quality" you mean something that could replace
> > >Windows, the answer is never.
>
> I should mention that I'm much less pessimistic than that. Never is a
> long time, and some revolutions are big enough to sweep aside
> installed bases. In 1987, if you had asked me how long soviet
> communism would last, I would have given it at least 50 years. By 1991
> it was mostly gone. This seems a good time to repeat one of my
> favorite Milton Friedman quotes:
>
>   We do not influence the course of events by persuading
>   people that we are right when we make what they regard
>   as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping
>   options available when something has to be done at a time
>   of crisis.
>
While it is a good quote, the problem for capability desktop is not
getting mindshare IMHO. I think capability OS-es yet have to grow to
the level of user mindshare problems. There are quite a lot of
technical and usability issues to be overcome in order to get at least
a usable command line environment. And things will get much more
interesting with graphical desktop.

IMHO the most acute problem is a good application-level persistence
model (unless I have missed some breakthrough here). Note I do not
think that orthogonal persistence model is sustainable in the long run
(more on that is here:
http://constantine-plotnikov.blogspot.com/2007/02/software-system-longevity-paradigms.html).

Constantine