The mythical WebOS
October 3, 2007
Cross posted to TechBizMedia
The tech blogosphere rarely talks up infrastructure and other non-sexy technology, so all the attention to Amazon’s Dynamo is good to see. I am going to use the headline from Techcrunch to ruminate over what a WebOS means to me, if anything at all.
When the word WebOS was first mentioned, the first thought that came to mind was logging into a computer with a lightweight OS and choosing a functional environment from a list of available options. For the time being, lets call the options, GooFox, Firefox, Explorer and Safari. Lets say you call up Firefox. Then, voila, the computer would go to someplace on the web and pull open all the functionality required to work on the web, including a browser with all your favorite plugins and functionality. In this case the “OS” is the distributed infrastructure of the web, served up by the likes of Amazon, 3Tera, Google, etc, the interface the browser and the apps, all the web pages and web services that we want to use. The computer then becomes a client side processing engine for anything that requires client side processing.
The scary thing about that whole concept is that I agree with Nick Carr
Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.
That said, it is not one organization that is going to build a “WebOS”. While Google might have other ideas, any distributed infrastructure is going to be a mix of distributed storage, network infrastructure, web browsers, desktop computers and data centers that will be the work of many different people. This is the reason why I think that if there will ever be a technological Singularity, it will be when the WWW becomes the WWG, a world wide grid of interconnected resources. I am looking forward to the day I can login as myself into any computer anywhere, pull in “my” way of accessing the web, do what I need to do, whether it be email or launching a massively parallel MD simulation and then sign out and head my way. It is also why standards and open source are going to be critical and why we need to be very scared. The security and privacy implications of such a scenario are the stuff of multimillion dollar science fiction movies, one we and/or our children will all be part of.
Now comes the fun conjecture part. Who would benefit from this WWG? Google and Amazon seem to be rather well placed. On the hardware end, Cisco, Sun, IBM, Intel, etc will all benefit from the need for all that iron. However, the WWG is a funky acronym unless network bandwidths and latency become non-issues. In other words network infrastructure, cables, etc are going to be a big part of the WWG. Is it any wonder that Google is interested in installing undersea cable? They know all about the WWG.
I love Web 2.0, but it won’t hold a bone to the WWG. Of course cables and servers are not that sexy, so we might not have such a hulabaloo over it.
Further reading
Old RRW post on Amazon’s WebOS strategy
Kottke
Technorati Tags: WebOS, World Wide Grid
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