Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

If you think about it just so, there is an operating system more popular than any other, although you have to use one of the others to access it. Almost all computer users make use of it every day. It totally revolutionized the world of computing. I am speaking, of course, of the World Wide Web, as supported by the internet.

All that you need to access it is a browser, available on all operating systems. I have no difficulty envisioning an operating system that does little else, that is in fact a web browser and not much more. Many cell phones already act this way. You can access Web sites, get and write email, and make phone calls. That’s all the functionality there is, but what a powerhouse package! A Web-enabled cell phone does a world of things that were not even possible just a few years ago.

To sweeten the pot, Google (among many others) is beginning to put the most popular applications online, cutting out the need for a computer altogether. You can process words, build presentations, track your schedule, display your photos (taken with that same phone), and so on. The list of on-line applications is huge and growing every day.

I don’t know how many of you read the novel Earth, by David Brin, many years ago, but one of the stars of the book is a system not unlike the Web. I don’t remember the portable device that you carried having a lot of capabilities other than accessing the this future-Web. Once connected, a person could do almost everything one would want to, and (as I recall) absolutely everyone was connected.

There is some chance, then, that all of the talk (especially mine) about the supremacy of operating systems is useless. It may not matter if Windows is better, or Linux. We may all end up with a tiny device that we carry everywhere, a sort of combination telephone, credit card, music player, life manager, and computer, all through the child of today’s Web browser. If you stop and think about it for a moment, that makes much more sense than the way we do things today.

I think that I am ready right now, actually.