An interesting trend is rising among web.2.0 companies — fully online, fully operational Operating Systems that run in your web browser.
Yes, so it is an OS that runs from an OS — much like the movie “The Thirteenth floor”.
I was discussing this with one of our engineers today. I personally think they are (mostly) useless. They offer a single familiar interface rather than having to wrestle with many types of software, but that is a very tough thing to convince users about.
What I do find interesting about the best of them — Glide — is their “mobile OS”. That could be useful if I need to carry 1GB around with me on my cell phone, but then I could just carry a thumb drive.
At the end of looking at them, these are the only thoughts I can muster:
1- Why do people keep thinking that technology wins? Why do they invest hundreds of hours of coding useless things and expect people to buy them?
2- Scrybe’s calendar effect with context seems to be more common now (look at the picture below of Glide’s Calendar)
3- I really need to find out how they made the nice-looking “frosted glass background” effect (see second picture below with faded background).
September 21, 2007 at 3:33 pm
[...] perspective, and business value is hard to get immediately. Previously I have covered WebOS’s here, and [...]