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I think the modern idea of a "cloud" is the Plan 9 philosophy coming full circle. Many breakthroughs in Plan 9 (distributed architecture, everything as a file,

I think the modern idea of a "cloud" is the Plan 9 philosophy coming full circle. Many breakthroughs in Plan 9 (distributed architecture, everything as a file, unified user experience) are being recreated on the web (cloud storage/photos/music/email, open APIs so all your webapps can intercommunicate--when I squint really hard while looking at screenshots of Plan 9, it almost reminds me of google's suite). The OS will become extinct once everything happens in the web browser, and the OS becomes not much more than a web browser itself. And then they'll have pretty much reimplemented Plan 9.

vorador 17y ago
I think that this couldn't and shouldn't happen. It couldn't happen because of the services are provided by third parties. First open apis vary greatly from one service provider to another - and this differs _vastly_ from the plan9 idea of unificating everything as a file. And do you really expect google apps to communicate with their microsoft counterparts ? Second, I could hardly describe the web as having a unified user experience. Third, and this is the most important thing, is that you're describing a closed system. What if I want to make something my service provider didn't think of ?