An excellent article by the Solaris boss in News.com on the present future of software:
Computer operating systems are irrelevant, or should be, to most people.
To home and office users alike, it’s the applications that run on top of the operating system that really count. To the developers who create applications and Web services, it’s the middleware–the application server, directory, and so on–that counts.
The only people who should be concerned with the operating system are the chief information officer and folks who manage network resources. They’re the ones who have to deal with questions of availability, security and scalability–the capacity to grow without adding undue complexity.
Developers shouldn’t need to think about the OS; they should be able to aim higher, at a new software category I call the “service-delivery platform.”
The aim of the service-delivery platform is to make it just as easy for developers to create a large-scale service as it was to create a single shrink-wrapped program for a standalone PC. Developers need to know that certain components are always going to be there–a directory, a network file service, an application server. Those are the components of the service-delivery platform.
Although part of the base platform, these components may also come from a variety of companies offering open-standards-based technology, so long as they present a set of core services that developers can count on–and no proprietary extensions or libraries to cause porting problems.
Exactly the way we need to think of the Emergic platform.
