It is still the conduit between you and the hardware, that wont go away. This is, and always will be taken for granted in todays day and age.

When computers were isolated from eachother, the OS was fundamental to the success of the computer. The greater the functionality and flexibility that can be provided to the end user, the better chances of success. The OS has always been viewed as being the life of the computer system. In the "legacy" days of computing, thin clients were not that successful because of their lack of ability and the server side processing was too slow. The "pipe" was also too small and applications that ran on these thin clients always seemed slow and unresponsive.  With the fall in cost of desktop hardware, the concept of the thin client was all but dead. There were attempts to breathe a new breath of life into the thin client with minimal success. Until now.

It seems that the thin client, or the concept of it in varying forms is still around. When you consider the internet and how it works. Bringing content to end users via server side processing. The client side machine is not required to have major horsepower to consume modern sites. Content is server up dynamically and on the fly and the lines between traditional desktop computing and mobile computing are starting to blend together. When internet was first going mobile, web sites were serving up content using WAP or other mobile protocols. While this did offer the content to the end users, the mobile experience was still quite different than the desktop experience. The desktop had more computing power, had an armament of software consuming gigabytes of storage space. The desktop could consume content from just about any site and provide the end users with a rich and connected browsing experience. Things are changing though, and, at a torrid pace.

Mobile platforms like the iPhone, Blackberry and Android offer a comparable armament of software that allows for the mobile experience to be very similar to the desktop experience. The mobile computer processing capabilities are growing at an exponential rate and will only continue to become faster and more flexible in their capabilities. As well with the processing power is, comes huge advanced in the connectivity. Where 10 years ago, internet on your cell phone was possible, it was slow and costly. Today, you can have 7.2 mb/s downlink to a smart phone via first generation 3G technologies. With 4G on the horizon, the telco companies are quickly starting to toot 50-100mb/s service (downlink) by the end of next year. Some with more aggressive plans than others. LTE and other 4G based technologies are receiving much attention and billions of dollars (another topic all on its own).

So, where does that leave us. With the gap between mobile and desktop computing closing at an ever increasing pace, the mobile platforms of the world will soon, and are starting to dominate. While the old desktop PC may not be considered legacy anytime soon, the idea behind it is already obsolete. How much room is there in the world for that much redundancy in your computing needs. In the end, we as human beings (currently) can interact with one device at a time. We carry our cell phones with us everywhere, and the makers of those phones, combined with the providers of content are eager and willing to ensure that the experience on your mobile phone is identical if not superior than your old desktop experience. YouTube, Facebook MySpace et al can be managed and consumed from a mobile device. At the same time that you record a video on your mobile phone, you can upload it to the content provider. No need to go home, download from phone, and then upload from your computer.

Now, with all that being said, the role of the traditional OS is still to be the conduit between you and your hardware. But, there are changes afoot, changes that place the OS squarely as the conduit between you and your content and applications. More and more people are generating content on web sites. Right now, I am writing this document using Google docs, where it will live in my profile for probably forever. I don't have to be concerned that localized hardware failure will cause me to lose this document. Piece of mind in which I am all too familiar with the cost of preventing. Not only will this document live on goog's servers for a really long time, I can access it from anywhere including my smart phone. This flexibility gives me the opportunity to work on this document from anywhere I please, and at any time.

So, what does this all mean? Well, changes are afoot. There is a shift in the thinking of the consumer as to what their computing experience should be like. The old fat stalwarts of yesterday are failing to innovate to bring forth a paradigm shift in computing. It takes the younger, leaner, nimbler companies to drive that change. Google is one of the front runners in this shift. They get the opportunity to build upon the base of the open source community around the Linux operating system. By coupling the goog web experience into an operating system. Interesting things are on the horizon.

Cheers