This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

It came apparent to me today that an online based OS had already been done (a couple of times infact) and to a pretty good standard as well, in terms of technological development anyway. There is even a Wikipedia article describing the term WebOS, though there isn’t many terms not on Wikipedia. Pete a colleague on iDAT introduced me to one, which I have forgotten the name of, when I ran my idea past him earlier today. The one Pete showed me was good, but not great. I quickly Googled it to see what else I could uncover and I found it eyeOS an open-source online operating system, if you want to have a play then there is a demo link on their website. It is pretty sick, to be honest, there is allot of technology in use including; video playback, file uploads, office applications, instant messaging, photo management, email and contacts, to name a few. Also other things you don’t notice in an OS that are actually difficult to build like; window management, dragging and dropping files, file management and application management, basically allot of behind the scenes development. It is clear that allot of work has been put into creating this awesome RIA (Rich Internet Application), which is what it is when you boil down to it. It even has a third party application directory.

However no matter how much technology and cool animation you throw at something it doesn’t make it a good product or usable for that matter. What’s really weird is how they all advertise there WebOS’s in the same way ‘take your desktop anywhere’, well yeah but I can do that already with MobileMe. I have my files, photos, bookmarks and contacts what more do I need? apart from some decent applications, but for that I need access to the hardware of my machine thus a WebOS is insufficient, see where I am going here. There are two inherent problems with all the so called WebOS’s out there; one is they are all confined by the sandbox of the users browser, two they all emulate what a current OS does, just not as good. So what’s available on the market thats going to make me use OS X with Firefox to run their ‘OS’, nothing apart from the fact I can use the same desktop anywhere, which I can do already.

“Come up with a field of interest in culture and technology to write your dissertation on and come up with something you can make worth 40 credits linked directly to your dissertation, in a week”

Nice, no rush, no pressure, no none at all. Next, I did what I always do when faced with a challenge got silly drunk and put off thinking about it in anyway till the next day. There is some reason behind this before you stop reading! Firstly let’s get one thing straight, drinking wasn’t required, however it’s the week after freashers week and as I’m going to be bogged down with work for the rest of this term (at least) I needed to get more fun out of the way. Secondly, I can never completely remove something from my mind and as I have found by experience, something great just seems to come to me after a couple of days pondering the problem, most of the time in the shower oddly enough. I don’t know why or how it happens it just does.

The theory proved accurate, thankfully. I am going to look into the field of internet super companies and whether they can actually monopolise a given market, given the ‘open’ barriers to entry, to any market on the internet. And the project? I hear you say. No, I’m not going to monopolise the market to prove it can be done. What I am going to do is take an already monopolised market, convert it to an online market and innovate on it. Three simple steps, which will no doubt be very hard. I am going to take Microsoft’s dominant operating system Windows, build an online OS (obviously not as complex as Windows) and innovate. Innovation being the key, seeing as after reading The Google Story I can pretty much conclude that Google is where it is now due 70% to innovation. In a sentence they took a service (internet search) innovated on it and tore the market apart because their search was just better than the competition, thus I intend to do that.