In order to completely reimagine everything, you have to start at hardware, environments, and operating systems. For the past couple of decades we've been trapp

In order to completely reimagine everything, you have to start at hardware, environments, and operating systems. For the past couple of decades we've been trapped in a more or less "one size fits all" when it comes to all of these. Computer architecture got more homogenized, as did operating systems. But the web becoming a dominant, near universal platform gives us the ability to experiment with all of these. Just not in the way you'd imagine. We have the ability to create unique, experimental personal computing models now that will be immediately useful if they fulfill one requirement: they have a functioning, standards compliant web browser (with TCP/IP and all that's needed). If you only have this requirement, then there's a lot of freedom. Imagine a computer designed specifically for the "operating system" that hosts it (kind of like we used to have back in the days of diversity). I put that in quotes because it could be something LISP or Smalltalk-like, where the language is itself the "operating system." So long as such a thing came with a web browser (and I know it's a big task), it would be immediately useful and usable for most people. That means potential for wide adoption. A platform like this could then give rise to the "after-web". If the system was an object/actor one, people who had these platforms would inevitably decompose the objects/actors that comprise the built in web browser, pulling them out and giving them additional functionality within the confines of their own systems. Eventually, people would network only these objects with each other. Some standard might emerge from this, and we could have a true network of interacting objects. Of course, these computers don't have to have text-based languages or anything else. They just have to have a web browser somewhere inside of them. That's what I see as the real promise of the web: it's now universal presence and adoption is the gateway towards the thing that can replace it. But in order to do so we need to re-think personal computing in total.