The internet is arguably evolving as an operating system
in its own right, with IP, HTML, SMTP and other underlying
protocols combining with online application frameworks such as
SOAP, web services, Ajax, Ruby on Rails and mash-ups. Added to this
are remote web-based storage services, and increasingly
sophisticated online applications. The result looks like an OS
operating in the 'cloud'.
Commentators started to refer to the 'internet as an OS' around
1999, with the start-up WebOS Inc publicising the so-called web
operating system.
In 2002,
Tim O'Reilly wrote about "the emergent internet operating
system" as an open collection of web services.
At the time, an O'Reilly Research report documented emerging
technologies such as weblogs, instant messaging between people and
programs, file sharing, grid computing and web spidering. It said
these were the building blocks of the web OS.
Technology consultant Clay Shirky, who wrote the O'Reilly
Research report, said the "transformation of the web services
wilderness" had three stages. The first was the pioneer
'screen-scraping' stage. The second was where the websites
themselves would offer more efficient, XML-based APIs - and this
was starting to happen in 2002.
"In the third stage, the hodgepodge of individual services will
be integrated into a true operating system layer, in which a single
vendor, or a few competing vendors, will provide a comprehensive
set of APIs that turns the internet into a huge collection of
program-callable components, and integrates those components into
applications that are used every day by non-technical people,"
predicted Shirky.
But back to the present, has the internet delivered on this
vision, or is the success of large-scale distributed computing
still at the mercy of web bottlenecks and protocol mismatches?
Jim Webber is global architecture lead for
ThoughtWorks, and was
formerly a senior researcher with the UK E-Science programme, where
he developed strategies for aligning Grid computing with web
services practices. He said that he was not convinced about the
internet OS analogy.
"I can see a whole bunch of useful application protocols and
infrastructure turning the internet into a useful piece of
application middleware. But it may be a little bit of a stretch for
now to call it an OS," he said.
"It's not so much internet-as-OS as I see it, but
web-as-middleware. In that sense HTTP is the key piece in the whole
puzzle, but the supporting infrastructure is web caching and the
whole move is towards services being geared towards the web, rather
than proprietary silos or impenetrable enterprise standards."
"The web is a distributed system, which means it's fallible in
the same way as any other distributed system, said Webber. "It's
latent, it's unreliable, and it's prone to partial failures. None
of which applies to a traditional single-host operating
system."
Andrew Overton is managing director of specialist consultancy
Savantis, which uses open source tools such as
Ruby on Rails. He also
rejects the notion of the internet as an operating system and
instead emphasises the connection between the internet and open
source development.
"The phrase 'internet as an operating system' was coined by
people who began viewing the OS as irrelevant, which it isn't.
Although the web and browser enable you to access a lot of
applications, you still need an operating system for all the
everyday things such as file management, non-browser applications,
and drivers for hardware - what you have in the operating system
limits what you can do."
"Open source allows users to break free of certain boundaries
and gives them scope for competitive advantage. Ultimately, it's
the only reason that the internet could exist, as individual
companies have historically fought to control whatever network
sprung up through their own incompatible hardware and
software."
"Whatever the big players tell you, the internet and open source
software are yoked together.
They're dramatically accelerating the growth of each other but
it's simply wrong to view them as a unified system."
But not all experts share this view, and many do believe that
the internet's pervasive nature makes it akin to an OS.
Ben Jones, technology director at design agency
AKQA, which produces digital
campaigns for companies including Nike, Virgin, Coca-Cola and Fiat,
said that the basic internet standards TCP/IP and HTTP have stood
the test of time, and form the basic building blocks of the current
wave of web innovation. Public APIs allow new web applications to
be created by piecing together services from multiple sources.
"The net is gradually moving up the ladder - it's gone from
providing basic infrastructure services (TCP/IP, HTTP) to more
application-level solutions (Google Maps API), and now complete
applications, in the same way that MS-DOS provided the basics for
making a computer work, to Vista's integration of video editing
tools, games etc," said Jones.
"This is allowing previously siloed applications, or
organisations, to join forces to create something new."
However, he added that the internet also presents security and
privacy risks to users, and this is where the model of the internet
as an OS is flawed. As an OS, the web is simply not trustworthy,
said Jones.
Mike Reid, UK managing director of
Sapient Consulting
agreed that the security of the internet is a concern for the
company's corporate users, many of whom have corporate policies in
place prohibiting the storage of files on third party storage -
which includes web-based storage.
"In the future, internet providers will need to face the
challenge of demonstrating their adherence to security standards,
and their ability to guard the confidentiality of their customers'
files. Internet pipes will also need to become fatter to allow for
the high data transfers from people using the internet as a primary
or secondary storage platform for their data," he said.
But he added that the foundations of an effective 'web OS' are
already in place. "As more devices become available that allow
access to the internet, it continues to become a computing solution
that is 'always there'. Wireless technologies have helped to a
great extent by making services widely available and affordable
while the progression of virtualisation technologies has meant that
service providers can make computing and storage solutions more
cost-effective."
Online applications have evolved from a time when the web was
primarily used for e-mail and chat to the point that application
service providers are now providing web solutions that are part of
companies' day-to-day operations, said Reid.
Several internet companies are making applications available
over the internet - better still a lot of them are free - such as
Google Docs - that allow you to create word documents, spreadsheets
and presentations online, he added.
The result, said Reid, is that as more applications become
available over the internet, desktops and laptops will continue to
get thinner. "They will essentially turn into a network device with
input and output functions, while the majority of the processing
and storage will be happening remotely."
The emerging technologies that will help the internet to
function well as an operating environment include AJAX, JavaScript
and the Document Object Model (DOM), which make it possible to
create complex web-based user interfaces, said Nick Mann, managing
director of digital design agency Interdirect.
XML is also a vital component without which the ability to
expose and transfer large bodies of data between heterogeneous
systems would be very much harder, he said.
He also counted SOAP/Remote Procedure Call among his "star
technologies" as these enable applications to be successful
distributed across large arrays of servers, and interact with each
other.
Mann said that one example of how far online applications have
come is an online version of Photoshop, rendered in Flash -
www.splashup.com.
Mann added, "Web 2.0 paradigms are good examples of the internet
acting as an OS, for they enable vast numbers of geographically
distant people to concurrently work together to produce a huge body
of information. Wikipedia, Youtube and eBay are all fantastic
examples of precisely this."
The future of the internet as an OS will see a closer merging of
the boundaries between the web and the desktop, provided the
security issue is resolved, said Mann. We will also see more
web-based software, more web-accessing desktop software, and layout
managers, like
PageFlakes or
iGoogle, becoming
increasingly popular.
Interestingly, however, the web is also heading back to the
desktop with products like
Adobe Air (a
rich internet desktop tool), Google Gears (an open source web
application project) and
Microsoft
Silverlight (a cross-browser, cross-platform, rich media
plug-in), said Mann.
One commentator, Graham Massey, chief technology officer of
Accenture UK, said that the internet as an operating environment
works well, and has had great success as an inter-network and
distributed hyper text/media system.
But he did see some areas for progress and improvements.
Massey commented that its weaknesses tend to lie in areas such
as web governance - particularly domain naming and registration
which has been subject to outbreaks of rent-seeking behaviours and
reform bottlenecks caused by differences in approach by consumers,
commercial technologies and even governments.
Another area of weakness is the inconsistency of 'user
experience,' said Massey, who added that this has been illustrated
by net neutrality disputes and the P2P/ISP business model
debates.
But Massey said that going forward, we will see further
consolidation of web and web SOA/mashup approaches major
investments in web storage, and continued refinements to unified
communications.
It is clear that the internet has evolved into a highly
sophisticated mechanism for delivering interactive web
applications, and even for storing data and collaborating online.
But as to whether it has delivered on the vision of becoming a
fully fledged OS for a distributed computing system, the jury is
still out.