The Cathedral and the Pirate

This is Steve Gillmor-class word salad. Microsoft is alternatively described as a ship, a water buffalo, a cathedral construction crew, something that guards a basket, a monarchy, and a net hanging in the jungle. The various metaphors try to fight it out, but they don't have a chance amidst all the cliche and jargon.<p>This level of inattention to language makes me think that not many neurons were fired during the writing of the article, and prejudices me against what might be a perfectly valid point, if I could find it.

It's amazing how much commentary there has been about a piece of vaporware that is over a year from release (at least). Oh, I'm sure Google will release it, but there is so little known about the final architecture that it is almost impossible to speculate intelligently about it.<p>And does anyone see the parallel with the Java Network Appliances that were going to be "the next big thing" at the end of the 90's? Certainly, we live in a much more connected world today, but to pretend that nothing of value is done on PCs except opening up a browser is a bit of a blindered view, IMO. Oh well, it's all just speculation until there's a product..

I am running Windows 7 on a SSD right now. While most of the author's points aren't based on the assertion that this is impossible, such a poorly researched argument makes it hard to take the rest of the article seriously.

I think the section "MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES" from Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line was a much better analogy, despite it being a slightly different, but related, topic. That whole intro analogy bit could have been skipped without losing anything.

<i>Microsoft could have taken .NET and created a thin layer of glue onto the hardware, and come up with a really good, robust, and revolutionary OS</i><p>... That ran only on one exact hardware configuration.

Microsoft will, of course, offer a similar product based on IE + Bing + Live. The only real loser here are the PC OEMs. In 2 years they'll be reminiscing about the good ole' days of high margin netbooks.

"Windows is an enormous collection of design mistakes that work well enough to get by."<p>Don't forget, Windows was ripped of of the Mac, so....

Really, this is one of the very few article on GCOS that actually make sense (or at least tries to). So far, most of the coverage has been "ZOMG!!1! SHINYCOOL NEW!!1!".<p>Although I still don't think GCOS will take over the world. It's going to be an OS for the clueless. I'm pretty sure most geeks would rather use a regular Linux distro than a stripped-down web-centric OS that has Google's branding everywhere.