What an operating system ought to be like

I feel lucky that I grew up side by side with computers. Whenever they introduce new things, you just catch up. It’s kind of sad for “computer learners” when they’re crammed with all those “computer knowledge”. Computer things are just things that happen around me everyday so you just know them.

Besides the ability to program, I am not a computer science guy so I am more of a computer user. So I’d like to say something from the user’s point of view. Whoever gets what follows, I hope you can be the new Bill Gates and rule the OS world.

Windows, Linux, Mac OS has all grown too “advanced” for daily users, not even to mention Solaris, FreeBSD those sort of heavenly things. What do you do on your computer every day? I can list my tasks on a napkin.

Whenever a friend asks you to “fix” his/her computer or something, they’ll say “I just want to do this and the computer won’t let me” (Or is not responding etc). So why don’t we have an operating that just does “this”.

My idea of an OS in the future is custermer-based. There are many tasks they can choose to do but the computers are designed just to do those. Microsoft offers a spoon that works as a remote to our TV. But why do we want a spoon that operates our TV? So that we can scoop and switch channels? But most of the time, we just want to get our food served, smoothly. So why don’t we have a computer that turns on and 4 choices shows up: check your email, surf the internet, use office or play some music.

It is not at all hard to hide all the configuration from the user with any already existant system, and the future of the business is to have personel remotely manage the software, system configurations, updates, installing of new functionalities on request from the customer, or at least the way I see it. The business could work like this: you go to a company to sign up for a computer like you do with a phone company. You give a description of what you need to do on your computer and the company will offer you something that turns on and does your work. (OpenOffice is probaby gonna get more popular.) If you need something else or something new, then you simply email the company and the engineers come up with a solution and they install the software remotely on your computor and you can work with it the next day.

I wonder my idea will get expensive, but considering the engineer’s ability to manage thousands of these actions on a computer per day, it should not at all be. The time should largely be spent on understanging the customers’ peculiar requests that says: I want the computer to pick up a call for me at 4 and order grocery at 4:30. But those are not at all undoable. You just install a software, again, customized, to let them schedule their weekly shopping at Wal-Mart by filling in a time and a shoppint list.And above all, the thing got to be simple. No configurability at all at the user’s end.

Microsoft stopped Microsoft Bob which may be a not bad choice because the thing with Microsoft Bob is, as always, we don’t want something fancy and complicated, we want things simple and efficient.

This resembles what I have in mind in a way, only less specialized and with no real user support:

http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/turn-your-old-pc-into-a-webapp-monster-with-gos-318346.php