Great paper. We need more discussions about such fundamental topics. Remember the "Information at your fingertips" speeches of Bill Gates (Comtex '90 and '94)

Great paper. We need more discussions about such fundamental topics. Remember the "Information at your fingertips" speeches of Bill Gates (Comtex '90 and '94) and the Cairo operating system, its ObjectFS filesystem and later WinFS? * Information at your fingertips Bill Gates Comdex Keynote 1995: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0O0Xjpjvfc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0O0Xjpjvfc * Information at your fingertips Bill Gates Comdex Keynote 1990: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxUPSF2K7Cs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxUPSF2K7Cs * Microsoft's Cairo operating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) * Bill Gates' The Road Ahead book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book... * WinFS and its history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS The current operating systems haven't really advanced since Windows 95 - the user interface and the development APIs (not the kernel mode part). Some mobile OS are even a regression. The idea of compound documents format was not bad, just OLE2 was cumbersome (and a vendor lock-in). With HTML, its IFRAME and HTML-based desktop GUI we could achieve the paradigm shift that Bill envisioned.