An OS Or a Browser?

Forbes.com has recently published a short story about PI Corporation, being run in a stealth mode by Paul Maritz. Some of you may remember Paul, as his divorce with Microsoft in August 2000 was unexpected by many. It is hard to tell if PI was in his mind back in 2000, but he admits they have been working on the product for several years now. So what exactly is PI and why is it so interesting? PI seems to be the concept that could not have been grasped by Redmond for a reason unknown to me... Unknown, because it seems so obvious. But may be this is just the problem, as obvious things often cannot be noticed by incumbents and create opportunities for small startups. PI aims to break the old PC paradigm. It is not the first one trying to do this. Think Google. Do they care what PC are you running? No, because everything runs on their servers and they need a PC to display and take input from. So PI promises a browser based software suite, with Net storage and other services. They want to break the PC paradigm. Old, isolated, has to be replaced by new, shared and connected.

Let us have a look at a PI Node, the basic building block of the PI suite. According to the PI website, a PI node consists of PI and 3rd party software to perform the following functions:

1. Host the PI applications via an HTTP interface
2. Provide Storage and retrieval services for information that's part of a user's Personal Information set
3. Interact with other PI Nodes to post and retrieve information
4. Authenticate owner and guest users, provide cryptographic services for secure information transfers.

As you can see PI aims to free the users from their PCs. All the applications and data are on the Web. Your browser is your "Windows" or "Mac OS". Network is your connectivity and storage. The concept itself is not entirely novel, as Google and many others go the same way. But Google has to tidy up its offering. There are already far too many services on the Google site than most even know they exist. Gmail is probably the most commonly used, and it should be turned into the application center, a launch pad for all the others Google Spreadsheets, Picasa Web Galleries, Google Reader, and others... But the goal is the same. As Paul puts it "The strength of the PC is also its weakness, people don't want a single dedicated computer. They don't want their whole lives bound up in one piece of hardware. People want to get access wherever they are, from whatever device they're using."

There is no doubt network and browser based applications will ultimately make operating systems obsolete. Mid term the role of an operating system will be to provide connectivity to local devices, such as keyboards, displays, mice, cameras, handling the hardware drivers and low level bus connectivity. But long term? Probably every device will have its own IPv6 address and TCP/IP will be the common interconnect bus among them. Once that happens a browser will become the only application run locally.