The Operating System: To be Obsolete?

September 30, 2008 · Filed Under Technology

As the Internet becomes more of a focus on what we do, I wonder, is Windows — indeed, any personal computer operating system — still relevant to our day to day experience? Of course it is to a degree, but it isn’t as central as it once was.

Think about it for a second: do you care anymore which operating system you use? I honestly don’t. For a few years, I owned both a PC and a Mac. I could use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox to access the Internet and general websites. I could write an article on one computer, send it via an email message to the other one, play games over the Internet, and it worked very well. One reason Apple and the Mac are suddenly gaining a little market share is that people have come to realize that they do not really need Windows or any OS anymore. Any OS will work just great for general application. The browser and the Internet have already rendered them largely irrelevant.

That said, the OS is not dead yet, and won’t be for some time, due to way things are engineered. But the day could come where an OS will simply fade into the background and be largely a blanket over the same bed you sleep on every night, so to speak.

Software (i.e. the OS) has to serve as the conductor between you and your hardware, overseeing memory usage, disk access and and related stuff. Those are the core functions of an operating system, and they’re still needed, even on a machine that relies only on the Internet. This is Computers 101.

How you interact with an OS remains an important thing. The operating system pilots and directs the interface between human and machine. If you don’t think the OS matters, spend some time talking to Windows hardliners and Macintosh fans. They have a real bond with the look-and-feel of their computers. It IS the computer to those users.

If you rely on the internet to find or store everything, this is a very bad idea, for many reasons. It is the weak link of a system, and it’s much more likely to fail than a PC’s hard drive is. So the operating system is here. For now. But within 10-15 years, that could definitely change.

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