I agree that a 'WebOS' is slightly silly, but I believe it to be a marketing name for a much stronger concept - the 'InternetOS'. Today's OSes were largely bui

I agree that a 'WebOS' is slightly silly, but I believe it to be a marketing name for a much stronger concept - the 'InternetOS'. Today's OSes were largely built for a disconnected world - the 'my machine is an island' scenario - which isn't necessarily the case today. The pertinent question is: where do today's systems fail us in an always or often-connected world? Maybe you'd work on the networking stack, providing services that made transferring between connections as seamless as possible (hopping from public wi-fi to 3G to WiMax, and prioritizing traffic based on network bandwidth and costs). Maybe we change filesystems to better support synchronization - for example, build in better change tracking so that we can synchronize using the minimum amount of bandwidth. Maybe you'd look for ways to be able to transfer the state of your applications, so you can work on one machine, and then continue working on your phone, then on your hotel TV, then back to the original machine. What about collaboration and communication? How can we build applications that seamlessly combine web information with local information (maybe even blurring the difference)? Not everything belongs in the OS, but the supporting functionality certainly does. None of these ideas are particularly new, but today's software stack is in need of some pretty serious evolution to get the most out of the promise of a connected world. Javascript based desktops are an interesting prototype - maybe Javascript & HTML would be a good technology for portable applications. I'm not going to dismiss the bigger need because today's 'WebOS' systems are little more than toys...