Tim O'Reilly on The State of the Internet Operating System

"The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that’s the Internet." --Dave Winer http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/08/01/heyMikeIToldYouS...

All vendors attempt to influence the relative positioning of their applications on their platforms. Microsoft and Apple have long thrived with this model, and I expect Google to too.

The difference with Google is that I also expect them to be more open about it, hence the open sourcing of Android and perhaps other OS moves they make.

I think this is significant because of Google's investment into public infrastructure. They are not building out a platform upon which only they can make money. I see Google as the number one contributor to the Internet Operating System today.

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.

The article is more interesting as an insight into Tim's mind. He thinks very highly of himself. He claims that he alone organizes and launches all the O'Reilly conferences.

Maybe it was done for brevity, or maybe he alone truly is the heart of the company. I would feel uncomfortable taking sole credit for organizing and launching conferences without acknowledging the few hundred people who actually do the work.