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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 mainstrea

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.
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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.

deleted 4y ago
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