not sure how long it's going to take to get there but I think unikernels/library OS are the future. cloud computing is moving in the direction of lots of small tasks running in strong isolation and communicating over the network instead of via IPC and shared memory. there's a lot of surface area in traditional operating systems that is completely unused by most modern applications and just sits there consuming cycles and waiting to be attacked.

it’s the tooling that’s lacking now. Whoever gets it right could make a lot of money.