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There is a really key quote towards the end of this piece that really captures the spirit of this post, and that's from Satya Nadella. I'm including it in its e

There is a really key quote towards the end of this piece that really captures the spirit of this post, and that's from Satya Nadella. I'm including it in its entirety because I think it does a really good job at summarizing what Ben is writing about here: "Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about." The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

mupuff1234 4y ago
> There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. I just don't see that. How exactly is Microsoft better placed than Apple or Google?
- number6 4y ago
  I think the "OS" that abstracts everything away is the web. Foremost these Javascript Applications. With Microsoft 365 they took the Idea of Google Suit and integrated it in their OS. Google tried it the other way and failed. But ultimately they are talking about the Chrome Book. Well even beyond that. It shouldn't matter which hardware you use and this is brilliant; it's just not Microsofts Idea.
  - user5678 4y ago
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Not only the Web, we are now doing at large scale what Xerox, Sun, Apple, IBM and Microsoft envisioned during the last century, distributed computing with RPCs. The Web is only one form of exposing those RPC endpoints.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Apple services are very much tied to Apple Hardware and iOS/OSX
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bee_rider 4y ago
  MS is somewhat unusual in that they are, in some sense, "about" providing a platform but not really capable of consistently knocking it out of the park hardware-wise.
- sreekotay 4y ago
  For sake of argument, not Apple because they are too close to the HW (specifically their own), and not Google because they are too far away from the HW (completely fractured). Amazon is an interesting underdog here...
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Microsoft is simply making more money from more customers on it. Google Workspace is the main competitor, but they're not the front runner, they're second place. Things like Apple Pages and Keynote are only used by a small fraction of consumers. They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone. Because anyone who can create a great presentation would never think of things as "enterprise productivity solutions". They'd just make an awesome presentation.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      Right, that's exactly it. You can create a great presentation... but you can't collaborate on it online integrated with your office's directory of contacts, create todo items from within it that show up on people's calendars, embed live figures from your colleague's modeling spreadsheet, get signoff on it from colleagues as part of a standardized process, and so on. If you're using Keynote to make an awesome presentation as a solo project, it's fantastic. If you're using it for enterprise productivity, it's a non-starter.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        You're using the phrase "enterprise productivity" to describe what I think are some of the optional features of Office, and at least some of which are probably a bad idea. Getting signoff from a standardised process aside of course; any tool can participate in that.
  - abudabi123 4y ago
    Apple Pages, Notes and Keynote on iPhone could do with more user-ability testing at the back of an Uber, Didi, train, taxi or bus. Make it easy to bullet point and page separate. Sometimes you feel the iPhone apps don't get dogfooded by the Apple developers and those apps are only there to fill in a tickbox for someone souless.
- neosat 4y ago
  This ^ is spot on. While the general 'abstraction' argument is spot on, MS is in fact poorly placed to be the 'OS' that becomes that abstraction. In fact, arguably it doesn't even need to be an 'OS' level concept. An example is google docs or WhatsApp. I can work on documents seamlessly across different actual 'OS' because the application abstracts that away - and it is sufficient. If an OS were to abstract all of this, it would also involve numerous compromises, notably on the tightly integrated end-end experience (hardware to UX), which is Apple's entire strategy against the likes of Microsoft. So no MS is not the best situated to be that 'OS'. 1. It is unclear if such an OS (with the benefits and trade-offs) will be preferred to a world where cross-OS applications can abstract away the OS. 2. Someone like Google (minus their execution woes that seem to get worse in recent years) is better positioned to abstract away the complexities for a regular consumer.
  - user5678 4y ago
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Paraphrasing Sun, the network is the computer, so it is a matter of who has more valuable distributed computing APIs and how they are exposed to the world.
- soundnote 4y ago
  Apple is Apple only, and is an upmarket status signal. Not a good fit as a cross-device services layer, which is what Thompson is talking about there. Google is moving in that direction (including hiring a former Office exec to run Workspace), in providing an integrated bundle. They're just behind, and have been fucking around with their chat, which is one of the cornerstones of the cloud platform. As Thompson notes, Teams was built to be the "web OS" from the get go, not a Slack clone even though most thought it was one. In Thompson's view, the best players to try to be the web OS are chat providers (due to chat network effects) and cloud storage providers. You can already see Salesforce and Dropbox making moves in that direction. To quote: > This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that. ... > Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically. (me again) Google, in theory, has the pieces to do it. But they're just behind in many ways - compliance, Microsoft's MSP network and sales staff on the ground, management tools, stuff like that. And there's the other question of "do they have enough at least mediocre things integrated together well enough" to make the play. They might, but not yet.
AuthorizedCust 4y ago
The parent comment has no replies, and its text is taking on gray tones, indicating poor votes. How is it the top comment? I thought comments were mainly sorted by vote-based ranking?
gigel82 4y ago
Chugging that kool-aid I see...
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
shuntress 4y ago
In your opinion, how does TypeScript fit in to the sentiment expressed by this quote?
orangepurple 4y ago
How do automated birthing pods and human biomass recyclers affect user identity verification compliance and lifecycle testing requirements? I don't think your plan is well thought out.
q-big 4y ago
> "Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life What you are creating is then clearly not an OS, but an abstraction layer over operating systems. In other words: claiming that are creating an operating system this way is in all likelihood a blatant lie.
- fassssst 4y ago
  Isn't that what a web browser is?
  - q-big 4y ago
    I agree that a web browser is an abstraction over some parts of what an OS offers. But a web browser is clearly not an operating system.
- costcofries 4y ago
  +1 What really matters are powerful experiences that allow people to get things done, easily. Eliminating workflows. Sorry that's overly simplistic but that's what it is.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  That’s just arguing semantics.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." – Dan Ingalls, in an article in Byte Magazine, 1981
beebmam 4y ago
> I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. I had to abandon Apple hardware because of their hostility to interoperability. Hard for me to not feel resentful over this.
- abofh 4y ago
  You're not alone - I more or less bailed around the iPhone/iTunes start, once amazon gave me a way to 'own' my music outside of an OS/hardware dependent ecosystem, I left. Apple makes everything wonderful if you never leave their walled garden, but I operate linux servers, I support mac engineers, and I provide service to windows clients. The only OS that makes supporting all three harder is macOS.
  - croutonwagon 4y ago
    Interestingly. Thats the main reason im still on an iPhone. I dont use Apple Music or iTunes anymore, it has caused too many headaches. But i DO use PlexAmp. And it works great, works with FLAC, will transcode, and allows you to selectively cache things. Its not perfect. There are hiccups with transitioning to Carplay for example. But in general, if not for PlexAmp, i likely would have ditched iPhones after having them since roughly the 3gs (with a few google/Android phones smattered in between, namely the Nexus One and Galazy Nexus).
  - trelane 4y ago
    > The only OS that makes supporting all three harder is macOS. How is Windows easier in this regard? Managing Windows clients requires a whole cluster of Microsoft services, no?
    - Shared404 4y ago
      You can use AD on Linux as well though, either joining a windows domain or running one from linux with LDAP afaik.
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      Define "managing" and "whole cluster". For basics you only need a one machine with Active Directory role installed. Everything else depends on the needs.
verisimilitudes 4y ago
This describes a mainframe with dumb terminals.
robomartin 4y ago
> "abstracting all of the hardware in your life" This is precisely where I think MS failed miserably with Windows Phone. They had an incredible opportunity: Make a smart phone that is a full, natural, joined-at-the-hip extension of your desktop. They did not. Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. They were playing "We too" when they should have been playing "Check this out!". Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone. Add to that an open API for developers to be able to integrate desktop Windows Phone services into their applications and MS would have had the makings of an ecosystem that would have just exploded into the business community in a massive way. Instead they wasted time and money with an offering that did exactly the same things as any other offering while trying to invent a new UI. The strategy was doomed to fail before the first phone was introduced. They tried to build an iPhone with a different UI when the business world would have energetically adopted a deeply integrated extension to desktops in the form of a smart phone. To this day, I still think I would drop iPhone in a second if MS came out with a well thought out system along the lines I described above. The paradigm shift (or the twist in thinking) is that the phone is given life as an extension to the desktop experience rather than as an afterthought that behaves as a peripheral. It would be like a sci-fi movie where the person grabs an application from the screen, it materializes as a physical device in their hand and they walk away. When they get to the office they push it into their display and it melds into that system instantly. Sci-fi aside, that feeling and utility would be incredibly useful.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  > Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications What the hell are you talking about? What does this actually mean in real terms? Right now Windows already desperately tries to do exactly what you're saying.[1] Do you want a PalmPilot-style sync app? iPad/Mac-style "Universal Control"? 1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-devices?r=1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...
dm319 4y ago
I use a Linux laptop with my favourite applications (vim, vim-wiki, Firefox, pass). I don't try to integrate across devices, I just take it around with me.
xen2xen1 4y ago
I've found that so much of what I used to have centered around Google has moved over to Micrsoft for me. I don't pay for anything (or very little) Google wise but pay for Office monthly. If Microsoft had a GOOD Google voice competitor, well ...
- bbu 4y ago
  Something to rival google photos would be great!
userbinator 4y ago
The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". ...so that it's no longer in your control, nor perhaps even your property anymore at some point. The 3rd E isn't "extinguish" anymore; it's "enslave".
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
I'd counter that with the advent of apps and services (SaaS) is essentially the operating system now. The notion of "there's an app for that" and most mainstream apps are cross platform, so they are the thing that binds to our daily lives more than some HW abstraction OS. I can use various SaaS to do everything and it doesn't matter if I'm running a device from Microsoft, Apple, Google or third-party Android device builders. The OS doesn't matter at all for the majority of users.
- localhost 4y ago
  For personal use, I'd mostly agree, but without a common identity over those SaaS services the user experience isn't as ideal as it could be. As a simple example, consider how you would share a file between two different identity systems - you can't - you effectively have to use the security by obscurity trick of "whoever has this link can {read|write} this file". In enterprise use cases where the company pays for the service, you really want to integrate these SaaS services into a common shell and this is the role that Teams plays. You get single sign-on with enterprise credentials, a way to share data with those 3rd party services, and a way for multiple users in your organization to collaborate together with those 3rd party services. This is the place where Microsoft is currently in a leadership position. Teams is increasingly viewed as being the "cloud OS shell" for enterprise users. Ben has written about this for quite some time - see this earlier piece from 2020: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/ https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/
- rising-sky 4y ago
  Agree. I think the so called "cloud" is _the_ abstraction layer for apps and even across apps. Anecdotal example that just happened to me, I'm reading a PDF on my iPad with an app called PDF Expert. When I highlight text in PDF Expert, I'm able to see the highlight in the native PDF Reader on iPad OS, and also when I open the file in the Kindle app, I get prompted to pick up from my last read location (from PDF Expert). All of that is possible because I store and read the same file from an iCloud drive. The ability to share state between apps and in a format that they can consume and mutate is they key here, so the user does not think about what software OS is actually running underneath, or even which application. The latter still needs more work to allow interoperability based on standards, the missing ingredient there is motivation not technology.
generalizations 4y ago
Honestly, that sounds like the dream of plan 9. Full circle indeed.
truncate 4y ago
I think, we used to called that cross-platform applications not Operating System. Honestly, it sounds trying to too hard to sound like sell a vision that already exits for a while. That's not a new idea IMO. Java wanted that, Adobe has been trying to do that with their CC stuff, Google has been on it for a while, Apple does that within its own ecosystem for all devices you would want to use (iCloud, handoff for applications, AirPods ...). I don't know why Microsoft is frontrunner with this. Microsoft probably can work with more platforms, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough with each other those compared to say Apple or maybe Google.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Less like java and more like dropbox, for all your stuff.
lake_vincent 4y ago
Just wanna add that WSL(2) is one the best things Microsoft has ever done, and has opened up Windows as a true developer's OS. The universality is amazing, and now I feel like I can truly use almost any piece of software OR hardware I can dream of (short of MacOS exclusive software, which is mostly creative media stuff anyway).
- vsnf 4y ago
  I was recently blown away when I was using WSL and accidentally launched the GUI component of an ubuntu program. A native ubuntu UI popped open, fully maneuverable over my Windows desktop environment. That was really cool.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    While it is cool, it is similar to using a X Server like Hummingbird back in the old days.
Mikeb85 4y ago
> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". > When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. > There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. In your example MS is the app, not the OS. The 'abstractions' that let apps run everywhere that matter nowadays are Unix (MacOS/Linux/Android/iOS), the JVM and the browser. And if we want to talk about an actual OS that runs everywhere, it's only Linux that's running truly everywhere: on servers, consumer devices and IoT devices. Or on the level above that, the browser. You guys lost out on mobile years ago, now it's just Office, Azure and XBox; admittedly some big businesses there, but far from the layer of abstraction that "everything" runs on...
- scarface74 4y ago
  If winning in mobile as an OS provider looks like Android where Google doesn’t make that much: https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generated-31-billion-revenue-google-oracle https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate... And ends up paying its major competitor $18 billion+ a year, I’m not sure it was a bad thing that Microsoft loss and instead makes money by selling apps that run across all platforms. Yes I realize tte citation is old. But Android was already just as dominant as it is now by 2016. I doubt the fundamentals have changed. And no phone maker is making any real money except for Apple and Samsung and Samsung only makes money because it builds its own components.
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    I didn't say Android or Linux make as much money for companies as MS does off, say, Office, only that it is the OS that runs the most devices and websites we interact with. Winning looks like a race to the bottom because the abstraction layer matters less to consumers than apps.
  - user_named 4y ago
    Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi make plenty of money.
NicoleJO 4y ago
That's a pretty verbose way of saying we want to corner the market.
netsharc 4y ago
> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes Sadly I'm guessing the seamless interchange (we've seen the ads where people writing something in MS Word on their desktop continues on the sofa on a tablet) requires you to sign in to a cloud service. I'm still a cloud-skeptic (e.g. with Google randomly blocking access to files because of presumed hash-collisions), I guess if I really cared about the seamless integration I'd have to look into OwnCloud.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
I don't want an abstraction over all hardware in my life anymore than I want a steering wheel on my bicycle.

mupuff1234 4y ago

> There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. I just don't see that. How exactly is Microsoft better placed than Apple or Google?

number6 4y ago
I think the "OS" that abstracts everything away is the web. Foremost these Javascript Applications. With Microsoft 365 they took the Idea of Google Suit and integrated it in their OS. Google tried it the other way and failed. But ultimately they are talking about the Chrome Book. Well even beyond that. It shouldn't matter which hardware you use and this is brilliant; it's just not Microsofts Idea.
- user5678 4y ago
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Not only the Web, we are now doing at large scale what Xerox, Sun, Apple, IBM and Microsoft envisioned during the last century, distributed computing with RPCs. The Web is only one form of exposing those RPC endpoints.
deltree7 4y ago
Apple services are very much tied to Apple Hardware and iOS/OSX
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bee_rider 4y ago
MS is somewhat unusual in that they are, in some sense, "about" providing a platform but not really capable of consistently knocking it out of the park hardware-wise.
sreekotay 4y ago
For sake of argument, not Apple because they are too close to the HW (specifically their own), and not Google because they are too far away from the HW (completely fractured). Amazon is an interesting underdog here...
crazygringo 4y ago
Microsoft is simply making more money from more customers on it. Google Workspace is the main competitor, but they're not the front runner, they're second place. Things like Apple Pages and Keynote are only used by a small fraction of consumers. They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone. Because anyone who can create a great presentation would never think of things as "enterprise productivity solutions". They'd just make an awesome presentation.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Right, that's exactly it. You can create a great presentation... but you can't collaborate on it online integrated with your office's directory of contacts, create todo items from within it that show up on people's calendars, embed live figures from your colleague's modeling spreadsheet, get signoff on it from colleagues as part of a standardized process, and so on. If you're using Keynote to make an awesome presentation as a solo project, it's fantastic. If you're using it for enterprise productivity, it's a non-starter.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      You're using the phrase "enterprise productivity" to describe what I think are some of the optional features of Office, and at least some of which are probably a bad idea. Getting signoff from a standardised process aside of course; any tool can participate in that.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  Apple Pages, Notes and Keynote on iPhone could do with more user-ability testing at the back of an Uber, Didi, train, taxi or bus. Make it easy to bullet point and page separate. Sometimes you feel the iPhone apps don't get dogfooded by the Apple developers and those apps are only there to fill in a tickbox for someone souless.
neosat 4y ago
This ^ is spot on. While the general 'abstraction' argument is spot on, MS is in fact poorly placed to be the 'OS' that becomes that abstraction. In fact, arguably it doesn't even need to be an 'OS' level concept. An example is google docs or WhatsApp. I can work on documents seamlessly across different actual 'OS' because the application abstracts that away - and it is sufficient. If an OS were to abstract all of this, it would also involve numerous compromises, notably on the tightly integrated end-end experience (hardware to UX), which is Apple's entire strategy against the likes of Microsoft. So no MS is not the best situated to be that 'OS'. 1. It is unclear if such an OS (with the benefits and trade-offs) will be preferred to a world where cross-OS applications can abstract away the OS. 2. Someone like Google (minus their execution woes that seem to get worse in recent years) is better positioned to abstract away the complexities for a regular consumer.
- user5678 4y ago
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Paraphrasing Sun, the network is the computer, so it is a matter of who has more valuable distributed computing APIs and how they are exposed to the world.
soundnote 4y ago
Apple is Apple only, and is an upmarket status signal. Not a good fit as a cross-device services layer, which is what Thompson is talking about there. Google is moving in that direction (including hiring a former Office exec to run Workspace), in providing an integrated bundle. They're just behind, and have been fucking around with their chat, which is one of the cornerstones of the cloud platform. As Thompson notes, Teams was built to be the "web OS" from the get go, not a Slack clone even though most thought it was one. In Thompson's view, the best players to try to be the web OS are chat providers (due to chat network effects) and cloud storage providers. You can already see Salesforce and Dropbox making moves in that direction. To quote: > This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that. ... > Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically. (me again) Google, in theory, has the pieces to do it. But they're just behind in many ways - compliance, Microsoft's MSP network and sales staff on the ground, management tools, stuff like that. And there's the other question of "do they have enough at least mediocre things integrated together well enough" to make the play. They might, but not yet.

AuthorizedCust 4y ago

The parent comment has no replies, and its text is taking on gray tones, indicating poor votes. How is it the top comment? I thought comments were mainly sorted by vote-based ranking?

gigel82 4y ago

Chugging that kool-aid I see...

dang 4y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments.

shuntress 4y ago

In your opinion, how does TypeScript fit in to the sentiment expressed by this quote?

orangepurple 4y ago

How do automated birthing pods and human biomass recyclers affect user identity verification compliance and lifecycle testing requirements? I don't think your plan is well thought out.

q-big 4y ago

> "Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life What you are creating is then clearly not an OS, but an abstraction layer over operating systems. In other words: claiming that are creating an operating system this way is in all likelihood a blatant lie.

fassssst 4y ago
Isn't that what a web browser is?
- q-big 4y ago
  I agree that a web browser is an abstraction over some parts of what an OS offers. But a web browser is clearly not an operating system.
costcofries 4y ago
+1 What really matters are powerful experiences that allow people to get things done, easily. Eliminating workflows. Sorry that's overly simplistic but that's what it is.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
That’s just arguing semantics.
pjmlp 4y ago
"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." – Dan Ingalls, in an article in Byte Magazine, 1981

beebmam 4y ago

> I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. I had to abandon Apple hardware because of their hostility to interoperability. Hard for me to not feel resentful over this.

abofh 4y ago
You're not alone - I more or less bailed around the iPhone/iTunes start, once amazon gave me a way to 'own' my music outside of an OS/hardware dependent ecosystem, I left. Apple makes everything wonderful if you never leave their walled garden, but I operate linux servers, I support mac engineers, and I provide service to windows clients. The only OS that makes supporting all three harder is macOS.
- croutonwagon 4y ago
  Interestingly. Thats the main reason im still on an iPhone. I dont use Apple Music or iTunes anymore, it has caused too many headaches. But i DO use PlexAmp. And it works great, works with FLAC, will transcode, and allows you to selectively cache things. Its not perfect. There are hiccups with transitioning to Carplay for example. But in general, if not for PlexAmp, i likely would have ditched iPhones after having them since roughly the 3gs (with a few google/Android phones smattered in between, namely the Nexus One and Galazy Nexus).
- trelane 4y ago
  > The only OS that makes supporting all three harder is macOS. How is Windows easier in this regard? Managing Windows clients requires a whole cluster of Microsoft services, no?
  - Shared404 4y ago
    You can use AD on Linux as well though, either joining a windows domain or running one from linux with LDAP afaik.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    Define "managing" and "whole cluster". For basics you only need a one machine with Active Directory role installed. Everything else depends on the needs.

verisimilitudes 4y ago

This describes a mainframe with dumb terminals.

robomartin 4y ago

> "abstracting all of the hardware in your life" This is precisely where I think MS failed miserably with Windows Phone. They had an incredible opportunity: Make a smart phone that is a full, natural, joined-at-the-hip extension of your desktop. They did not. Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. They were playing "We too" when they should have been playing "Check this out!". Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone. Add to that an open API for developers to be able to integrate desktop Windows Phone services into their applications and MS would have had the makings of an ecosystem that would have just exploded into the business community in a massive way. Instead they wasted time and money with an offering that did exactly the same things as any other offering while trying to invent a new UI. The strategy was doomed to fail before the first phone was introduced. They tried to build an iPhone with a different UI when the business world would have energetically adopted a deeply integrated extension to desktops in the form of a smart phone. To this day, I still think I would drop iPhone in a second if MS came out with a well thought out system along the lines I described above. The paradigm shift (or the twist in thinking) is that the phone is given life as an extension to the desktop experience rather than as an afterthought that behaves as a peripheral. It would be like a sci-fi movie where the person grabs an application from the screen, it materializes as a physical device in their hand and they walk away. When they get to the office they push it into their display and it melds into that system instantly. Sci-fi aside, that feeling and utility would be incredibly useful.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications What the hell are you talking about? What does this actually mean in real terms? Right now Windows already desperately tries to do exactly what you're saying.[1] Do you want a PalmPilot-style sync app? iPad/Mac-style "Universal Control"? 1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-devices?r=1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...

dm319 4y ago

I use a Linux laptop with my favourite applications (vim, vim-wiki, Firefox, pass). I don't try to integrate across devices, I just take it around with me.

xen2xen1 4y ago

I've found that so much of what I used to have centered around Google has moved over to Micrsoft for me. I don't pay for anything (or very little) Google wise but pay for Office monthly. If Microsoft had a GOOD Google voice competitor, well ...

bbu 4y ago
Something to rival google photos would be great!

userbinator 4y ago

The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". ...so that it's no longer in your control, nor perhaps even your property anymore at some point. The 3rd E isn't "extinguish" anymore; it's "enslave".

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

I'd counter that with the advent of apps and services (SaaS) is essentially the operating system now. The notion of "there's an app for that" and most mainstream apps are cross platform, so they are the thing that binds to our daily lives more than some HW abstraction OS. I can use various SaaS to do everything and it doesn't matter if I'm running a device from Microsoft, Apple, Google or third-party Android device builders. The OS doesn't matter at all for the majority of users.

localhost 4y ago
For personal use, I'd mostly agree, but without a common identity over those SaaS services the user experience isn't as ideal as it could be. As a simple example, consider how you would share a file between two different identity systems - you can't - you effectively have to use the security by obscurity trick of "whoever has this link can {read|write} this file". In enterprise use cases where the company pays for the service, you really want to integrate these SaaS services into a common shell and this is the role that Teams plays. You get single sign-on with enterprise credentials, a way to share data with those 3rd party services, and a way for multiple users in your organization to collaborate together with those 3rd party services. This is the place where Microsoft is currently in a leadership position. Teams is increasingly viewed as being the "cloud OS shell" for enterprise users. Ben has written about this for quite some time - see this earlier piece from 2020: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/ https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/
rising-sky 4y ago
Agree. I think the so called "cloud" is _the_ abstraction layer for apps and even across apps. Anecdotal example that just happened to me, I'm reading a PDF on my iPad with an app called PDF Expert. When I highlight text in PDF Expert, I'm able to see the highlight in the native PDF Reader on iPad OS, and also when I open the file in the Kindle app, I get prompted to pick up from my last read location (from PDF Expert). All of that is possible because I store and read the same file from an iCloud drive. The ability to share state between apps and in a format that they can consume and mutate is they key here, so the user does not think about what software OS is actually running underneath, or even which application. The latter still needs more work to allow interoperability based on standards, the missing ingredient there is motivation not technology.

generalizations 4y ago

Honestly, that sounds like the dream of plan 9. Full circle indeed.

truncate 4y ago

I think, we used to called that cross-platform applications not Operating System. Honestly, it sounds trying to too hard to sound like sell a vision that already exits for a while. That's not a new idea IMO. Java wanted that, Adobe has been trying to do that with their CC stuff, Google has been on it for a while, Apple does that within its own ecosystem for all devices you would want to use (iCloud, handoff for applications, AirPods ...). I don't know why Microsoft is frontrunner with this. Microsoft probably can work with more platforms, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough with each other those compared to say Apple or maybe Google.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Less like java and more like dropbox, for all your stuff.

lake_vincent 4y ago

Just wanna add that WSL(2) is one the best things Microsoft has ever done, and has opened up Windows as a true developer's OS. The universality is amazing, and now I feel like I can truly use almost any piece of software OR hardware I can dream of (short of MacOS exclusive software, which is mostly creative media stuff anyway).

vsnf 4y ago
I was recently blown away when I was using WSL and accidentally launched the GUI component of an ubuntu program. A native ubuntu UI popped open, fully maneuverable over my Windows desktop environment. That was really cool.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  While it is cool, it is similar to using a X Server like Hummingbird back in the old days.

Mikeb85 4y ago

> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". > When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. > There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. In your example MS is the app, not the OS. The 'abstractions' that let apps run everywhere that matter nowadays are Unix (MacOS/Linux/Android/iOS), the JVM and the browser. And if we want to talk about an actual OS that runs everywhere, it's only Linux that's running truly everywhere: on servers, consumer devices and IoT devices. Or on the level above that, the browser. You guys lost out on mobile years ago, now it's just Office, Azure and XBox; admittedly some big businesses there, but far from the layer of abstraction that "everything" runs on...

scarface74 4y ago
If winning in mobile as an OS provider looks like Android where Google doesn’t make that much: https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generated-31-billion-revenue-google-oracle https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate... And ends up paying its major competitor $18 billion+ a year, I’m not sure it was a bad thing that Microsoft loss and instead makes money by selling apps that run across all platforms. Yes I realize tte citation is old. But Android was already just as dominant as it is now by 2016. I doubt the fundamentals have changed. And no phone maker is making any real money except for Apple and Samsung and Samsung only makes money because it builds its own components.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  I didn't say Android or Linux make as much money for companies as MS does off, say, Office, only that it is the OS that runs the most devices and websites we interact with. Winning looks like a race to the bottom because the abstraction layer matters less to consumers than apps.
- user_named 4y ago
  Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi make plenty of money.

NicoleJO 4y ago

That's a pretty verbose way of saying we want to corner the market.

netsharc 4y ago

> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes Sadly I'm guessing the seamless interchange (we've seen the ads where people writing something in MS Word on their desktop continues on the sofa on a tablet) requires you to sign in to a cloud service. I'm still a cloud-skeptic (e.g. with Google randomly blocking access to files because of presumed hash-collisions), I guess if I really cared about the seamless integration I'd have to look into OwnCloud.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

I don't want an abstraction over all hardware in my life anymore than I want a steering wheel on my bicycle.