What? No! He's not pushing for a move to the cloud. He actually did criticize the way we're building the cloud today: > "This is 2012 and we're still stitching

What? No! He's not pushing for a move to the cloud. He actually did criticize the way we're building the cloud today: > "This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon." To understand what he's talking about, keep in mind that Pike was a lead engineer on Plan9, a project aiming at creating the exact environment he's describing. And although the project never left the lab, it did affect the lives of the scientists working there. There are many reasons why Plan9 never went mainstream, but one thing is sure it was not technical inferiority. I don't think Pike is pushing for any agenda. I tried Plan9, and I see what he's talking about. Lack of widespread support and the relatively small number of available apps make it difficult to be the "primary" OS I use, but the design concepts like "everything is a file", union mounts or 9P are amazing and work like he describes. When a world renown OS scientist is asked about his "ideal setup", what answer would you expect? "I wish I could get the latest version of MacOSX and the newest chip by Nvidia"??