Are Operating Systems going away?
If you like to go to libraries you must have seen or used many "library terminals" with character based displays, black-and-white or black-and-green displays. They are pretty functional and enterprise users were exposed to them for a long time, but the graphical display has made them obsolete no matter how efficient and functional they were. We like colors and beautiful pictures and X terminals were simply too slow to provide a usable client-server environment.
When I opened a new bank account at a UK bank in 2006 I was stunned to see exactly the same X window environment I saw in 1995 when I opened the first one. It took minutes to refresh a window and the banker made lots of effort to fill in the long gaps between entering my address and date of birth. However, this is mostly the past, we are blessed with high speed ADSL and cable connections, plus AJAX and Flash has matured a lot to create a very pleasant graphical environment, much more light-weight than good old X. We have realized the dream of the client-server enrivonment, we can have mainfraims sitting in the server room and thin clients on the desktop.
The funny thing is that these evolutionary changes have happened nearly in parallel with some revolutionary ones, namely cloud computing - for servers - and netbook operating systems - for the desktop. The server room with the mainfraim can fully disappear, Google AppEngine, Amazon's AWS, Joyent or RackSpace can provide an excellent platform for developing and deploying our applications. While most of these platforms only virtualize your hardware and give you a Linux or OpenSolaris instance somewhere in the cloud, some of them - most notably AppEngine - also virtualizes your OS and provides you with an application container like Tomcat, Jetty or a Python equivalent.
Developers may be slightly insulted to have their powers taken away from them - so am I, to be honest - but the benefits of such a compromise are significant. A good example is Finnovatec, deveoping an application in the cloud right now. The app is quite simple, but data intensive and needs to scale beyond a couple of home brewn x64 Linux servers. Moving to AWS SimpleDB seems to be a good choice, but building the application requires system administration and monitoring. You might say that a robust application and the automation of server monitoring will do, but in the end of the day you want to be sure that no Saturday night sysadmin work will occur and you won't have to drive to the nearest Internet cafe on your holiday to calm down thousands of unhappy users. (Yes, I'm talking about startups and small companies here...)
The trend that Google is showing has a developer friendly cloud infrastructure and at the users' side a very thin client with something like the recently announced ChromeOS, basically a browser with well-integrated Web2.0 applications. The Ugly Duckling terminal is reborn beautiful, with happy users and happier programmers. But what will the sysadmin do?
